Dragonfly Partner Haseeb: We Earn from Plumbers, That's Called Uncs
Dragonfly managing partner Haseeb Qureshi corrected the generational metaphor in the crypto space during a conversation with Gauntlet founder Tarun Chitra: practitioners around thirty years old are called uncs, not because they are plumbers, but because they have made money from plumbers.
Haseeb defined plumbers as ordinary buyers who flooded in during 2017, essentially the standard users from the last bull market. Uncs are those who have been in the game and view that wave of people as their competitors. Tarun mentioned he likes the plumber meme and enjoys calling those who have been around long enough plumbers; Haseeb immediately clarified: these are two different groups and should not be conflated.
Tarun added a note on the semantic shift: now all traders chasing prices are collectively referring to the old DeFi practitioners as plumbers. The generational term has shifted from "who entered first" to "who seems outdated." In August 2026, traders first released the phrase "old guns are trading with plumbers," and the comments section referred to the legendary traders from 2017 to 2019 as softer retail, leading to the emergence of a meme coin named PLUMBER, which rapidly grew in market value driven purely by cultural factors.
The conversation took place against the backdrop of crypto Twitter having commodified age shaming. Haseeb has long been involved in the primary market and publicly criticized meme coins as akin to changing the dealer on every slot machine; Tarun's company designs risk and mechanisms for DeFi protocols. The two wrote thirty as the "previous generation" in the industry, indicating a compression of cycles: the retail label from seven years ago can now be reversed and applied to the professional players of that time.
In market mechanics, buying is about the retweet of identity jokes, while selling is about nostalgic pricing for those who entered in 2017. Funds flow from new meme coin projects to the earliest deployers who grasped the semantics. The beneficiaries are those who coin terms and issue tokens; the pressured are the old DeFi teams labeled as plumbers and the later entrants still buying coins under the 2017 narrative. Haseeb's correction is essentially a statement: profits come from the stratification of competitors, not from self-proclaimed seniority.
Note: Plumber in English internet slang originally refers to ordinary, slow-moving buyers, borrowed to describe funds that cannot handle on-chain microstructures. Uncs is a term borrowed from the internet to refer to older men, which has been adopted by thirty-year-old fund partners in crypto Twitter.
Source: Public Information
ABAB AI Insight
The crypto space uses familial terms to price seniority based on financial calendars that move faster than biological age. Retail from 2017 is called plumbers, while fund partners in 2026 are called uncs, with only one and a half cycles in between. Haseeb's insistence on separating the two groups is a defense of a trading history: early entrants profit from later entrants, rather than everyone becoming an outdated profession together. Tarun's point about semantic reversal is sharper—those chasing prices have started to label DeFi veterans with the same term, and generational authority is no longer in the hands of those who experienced it.
The capital path is that memes precede market orders. A single phrase can turn competitors into occupational discrimination, and developers can mint it into tokens, with liquidity following identity anxiety. Primary market partners and mechanism designers debate definitions on podcasts because definitions will determine who has the right to continue saying "we've seen the last round." Meme coins do not require correct etymology; they only need enough people to want to rebut or follow when called the wrong name.
Analogous to the "locals vs. retail" in traditional trading floors, and the internet's labeling of thirty-year-old engineers as uncles. The contrast is that early Bitcoin geeks never accepted the term plumber. The industry phase has shifted from protocol innovation to cultural storage: as new product narratives thin out, age stratification becomes a tradable commodity.
The structural change is the transfer of pricing power. The mechanism is that whoever can name the competitors can issue tokens with that name first; if the named party comes out to contest the definition, it actually gives the token another round of exposure. Haseeb writes uncs as a rentier identity and plumbers as a harvested identity, acknowledging that industry profits still come from the information asymmetry of entry timing, just that the timing has shifted from technical understanding to meme speed.
ABAB News · Cognitive Laws
Giving competitors nicknames is akin to naming tokens.
As cycles shorten, thirty-year-olds will also become the previous generation.
Those who have profited from plumbers fear being called plumbers themselves.