You see a lot of reference to people searching for Unicorns, which people typically mean to be a rare investment with strong upside. Unicorns are mythical animals and it is used to represent the statistical rarity of an investment getting to such a position.
Uniswap the popular decentralized finance application is named after Unicorns and uses a Unicorn as its symbol.
In finance, what a Unicorn actually refers to is a privately held start-up company valued at over $1 Billion. So essentially nothing in crypto is a Unicorn Investment because they are not companies and are not privately held (instead they are widely held).
Examples of Unicorns include:
SpaceX, Stripe, Epic Games, Telegram, Ripple (not XRP), Discord and Reddit.
If we ignore the company and privately held qualifiers, anything valued over $1 Billion is a Unicorn. Anything over $10 Billion is a Decacorn and anything over $100 Billion is a Hectocorn.
There are now an estimated 700 Unicorns and 30 Decacorns, the number is growing quickly.
Valuations of Unicorns are usually determined by recent funding rounds, as they are not publicly traded and often do not have strong earnings to base a valuation on (growth is the main metric).
Bonus term: Black Swan Event
A Black Swan Event is something which was thought to have been impossible or highly improbably, very hard to predict or rare. An example of a Black Swan Event may be Bitcoin dropping to $100 this year.
The term originated in Europe as something that is an impossibility (think "pigs can't fly"). In the 16th century it was commonly used in London as a statement of impossibility, as all known records and observations of Swans were white.
However in 1967, Black Swans were discovered in Western Australia by Dutch explorers.
The term then took on a new meaning, a perceived impossibility might later be disproven.
The term is often used in finance.
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