TikTok Dabloons or TikTok Doubloons are a

fictional currency A fictional currency is some form of system of money defined, depicted, or alluded to, in works of fiction, such as novels, films or video games. The names of units of such currency are sometimes based on extant or historic currencies (e.g. " ...

and internet trend on

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which started circulating around the social platform in November 2022. The "currency" circulates around the app using photo slideshows containing a cat offering it to the user, as well as cat "merchants" selling fictional food, housing, clothing, etc., which can be bought using the currency using an "

honor system An honor system or honesty system is a philosophical way of running a variety of endeavors based on trust, honor, and honesty. Something that operates under the rule of the "honor system" is usually something that does not have strictly enf ...

" making the users track their net worth through various methods such as writing on a whiteboard, notebooks, and spreadsheets. It also has its own fictional economy which has "dabloon" counterparts of the

IRS The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is the revenue service for the United States federal government, which is responsible for collecting U.S. federal taxes and administering the Internal Revenue Code, the main body of the federal statutory tax ...

and government to control "dabloon inflation".

Etymology

The word "dabloon" comes from a purposeful

misspelling Spelling is a set of conventions that regulate the way of using graphemes (writing system) to represent a language in its written form. In other words, spelling is the rendering of speech sound (phoneme) into writing (grapheme). Spelling is one ...

of the former currency called a "

doubloon The doubloon (from Spanish ''doblón'', or "double", i.e. ''double escudo'') was a two-''escudo'' gold coin worth approximately $4 (four Spanish dollars) or 32 '' reales'', and weighing 6.766 grams (0.218 troy ounce) of 22-karat gold (or 0.917 fi ...

", a Spanish gold coin worth around four

Spanish dollars The Spanish dollar, also known as the piece of eight ( es, Real de a ocho, , , or ), is a silver coin of approximately diameter worth eight Spanish reales. It was minted in the Spanish Empire following a monetary reform in 1497 with content ...

History

The trend's origins can be traced back to two images posted on

Instagram Instagram is a photo and video sharing social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. The app allows users to upload media that can be edited with filters and organized by hashtags and geographical tagging. Posts can ...

around April 2021 by user ''catz.jpeg'' of a cat's paw with the caption "4 dabloons" and a black cat with an outstretched paw with the same caption. By October 2022, "But it will cost you 4 dabloons", a phrase containing the caption became popular on TikTok via slideshows containing the sale of fictional items using the currency and by late November the trend exploded in popularity in the social platform with thousands of accounts posting content with the fictional currency. Videos using the hashtag #dabloons collectively gained nearly 800 million views, whilst its singular counterpart #dabloon collectively gained more than 400 million views as of the 28th of November 2022.

References

External links

{{Know Your Meme , tiktok-dabloons-tiktok-doubloons-4-dabloons-cat , TikTok Dabloons 2020s fads and trends 2022 in Internet culture Internet memes introduced in 2022 Fictional currencies TikTok