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 The generational term has shifted from "who entered first" to "who seems outdated."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