What is @inversebrah?
Most dedicated ‘Crypto Twitter’ users have likely encountered the short and enigmatic reply ‘@inversebrah.’ There’s also a good chance that many have no idea what it means.
Is it an account name, a saying, or an incantation? What’s supposed to happen after the reply? Who started the trend in the first place?
According to Vitalik Buterin, inversebrah is the funny polar opposite of ‘honorable intellectual.’ Understanding what this tag means, in all its wonderful incarnations, will instantly make your X (formerly Twitter) experience more enjoyable.
It all begins with the wassie — the cartoon creature in inversebrah’s X profile. Its lore is deep and rich.
The wassie remembers
Almost everyone has seen a wassie meme. Like the pepe, wassies are frog-like. However, unlike the ‘feels good man’ anthropomorphized stoner, wassies are a frog-platypus hybrid.
The small and endearing character boasts a radioactive origin story (much like Godzilla), is branded with a crescent moon on its chest, and occasionally sports a red McDonald’s baseball cap.
Anyone can keep a wassie as a pet, or ‘collec’ them as a source of food. Recipes include raw or cooked as soup or ragu according to an entertaining UrbanDictionary post. Wassies perish around two weeks in the wild or live out their maximum lifespan of 40 days inside a refrigerator. Their natural predators are cats — ‘hamcats,’ to be precise.
Wassies share powers — especially their fantastic memories of Crypto Twitter — and there might be an infinite number of them. Often, wassies die not by natural causes but by comical accidents. They then quickly reincarnate, retaining all memories except their pre-death moments.
The ‘very soul’ of Crypto Twitter
Inversebrah, who adopted the name ‘Smolting,’ a purposefully misspelled ‘small thing’ portmanteau, is the current leader of the wassies. Smolting shares poignant insights from his fantastic memory of Crypto Twitter’s history through brilliantly ungrammatical commentary about amusing, embarrassing, obscure, or cringe-worthy posts.
Ben Munster called inversebrah “in a way, the very soul of Crypto Twitter — a vessel for its eternal memory.” According to a link in Inversebrah’s X profile, he is ‘the record keeper of CT.’
What came before inversebrah?
However, Smolting was not always the top wassie. Maru, username ‘@wasserpest,’ created wassies in the first place. Maru’s banner image on X shows an early version of the frog-platypus wassie, which was seemingly supplanted some time ago.
Maru’s successor, ‘@cryptostardust,’ has a second-generation, McDonald’s baseball-capped and pistol-brandishing wassie as his profile picture.
Stardust was an irreverent, ‘sock-puppet master with his enormous army of twinks,’ according to the semi-reliable Urban Dictionary. After popularizing Maru’s wassies and executing an allegedly profitable series of trades — a ‘sniper’ trader — Stardust fought ‘Dr. Doom’ Nouriel Roubini about the merits of crypto and heatedly lost access to his Twitter account.
Following Stardust’s suspension, @inversebrah emerged as the community’s leader. Sadly, Stardust has not posted since 2021, yet Smolting continues to carry the wassie banner.
Summon the Smolting
Nowadays, anyone in the wassie community may attempt to summon Smolting’s powers by replying ‘@inversebrah’ on X. Often, he will not respond due to the imminent end of his two- to six-week lifespan, distracted with averting an accident, working a McDonald’s shift, picking a new hairstyle (it’s Trump-themed recently, of course), or otherwise uninterested.
Occasionally, however, he will share his immense memory of Crypto Twitter and comment on a screenshot of someone’s post.
Read more: A brief introduction to Bitcoin lore and Easter eggs
‘Inversebrah’ and ‘(wassie, verse)’
The username @inversebrah is a reference to either an inverted bitcoin price chart or an inverted version of Stardust’s profile image. Like Stardust, Smolting is a neutral party in the long-term debates about the merits of any particular coin, preferring to trade the ups and downs of markets.
Smolting’s predecessor posted endless price charts about short-term movements of bitcoin and altcoins, making money from volatility rather than long-term maximalism.
So, why does Smolting have the words ‘(wassie, verse)’ in his X username?
This is a reference to a ‘(3,3)’ trading strategy that supposedly maximized outcomes for participants in a community. OlympusDAO popularized (3,3) investing, a utopian outcome wherein every DAO participant stakes all their assets for the longest time possible. The ‘3’ refers to a quadrant of a 3×3 grid with labels Stake, Bond (a rebasing word that meant less ‘bond’ and more ‘mint another asset’ — a story for another day), and Sell for both the investor and other community members. If the investor and all other members stake, everyone would align to make the most amount of money.
The strategy eventually dissociated from OlympusDAO and became a meme, with variations like (9,9) and endlessly creative iterations.
Translated, therefore, Smolting is (wassie, verse). In other words, he advocates allocations to both ‘wassie’ and ‘verse,’ which maximizes the outcome for the community by not only combining to ‘wassieverse’ but also evoking versatility — a perennial quality of the wassie universe.
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