Crypto industry jargon is constantly evolving and acronyms are often used to make conversations more concise. While many acronyms are used in a light-hearted manner, there is one that is particularly useful: DPS. Short for “Drama Per Second”, coined by Avalanche blockchain founder Emin Gun Sirer, it is a measure of the “vibes” or hysteria of projects and their communities.

Take the Shiba Inu project, for example. They were attempting to create a Layer 2 solution with lower fees and higher throughput, but it failed spectacularly. This caused a huge spike in DPS as the team’s promises and the first implementation of the breakthrough never came to fruition.

Unfortunately, crypto projects have largely failed to underpin anything of substance in the ten years or so that it has been professionalized. If a blockchain fails, the only real victims tend to be investors trying to trade tokens on top of it. This is why DPS is the most valuable metric today, as it is a proxy for success.

Drama Per Second is a sign that projects are trying to become more legitimate. The days of simply promising transitions and shrugging to execute those goals are dying, as “number go up” is no longer a viable strategy. An uptick in DPS means an uptick in effort, and is indicative of a maturing industry.

Hopefully, in the future, more substantive metrics will matter. In the meantime, DPS remains a useful tool for measuring a project’s progress.