Meme coins seem to have ushered in a new round of hype in this cycle.
At the end of last year, memes such as MYRO, SILLY, and WIF set off the first wave of Solana meme fever in this cycle; the second wave of meme fever originated from the meme pre-sale wave launched by BOME and SLERF in March this year. Since then, the voices condemning VC coins have gradually spread, and more and more meme coins have been listed on CEX, gradually gaining greater acceptance; with the bull market turning into a bear market, altcoins generally performed poorly, and meme trading tools led by Pump.Fun further promoted the meme fever by upgrading infrastructure, prompting the third wave of meme boom. After the so-called September curse, the crypto market ushered in a new wave of trading craze, and the newly popular animals became the top meme. But recently, abstract art has returned to the market, bringing a new wave of meme hype potential.
The market value changes of the meme coin sector in the past year. Source: CoinMarketCap
Yesterday, the on-chain detective ZachXBT disclosed the wallet address of the shouting master Murad Mahmudov. This revelation quickly sparked heated discussions in the crypto community - should a crypto user who has not been accused of a crime be so "human fleshed out"? ZachXBT's reasoning is that people should make smarter decisions about the tokens they buy, rather than just following KOLs with a large number of fans.
Murad, the recently popular meme coin KOL, became a hot topic in the crypto circle with his speech on the meme coin super cycle at the TOKEN 2049 conference. He once boldly predicted that Bitcoin would reach $10 million, and is now considered to be the next generation of top-tier influencers after meme master Ansem. The reason why he can inherit the mantle is that Murad's shouting is very effective.
In the address of Murad disclosed by ZachXBT, he holds three meme coins, namely SPX, APU and MINI. On Twitter, Murad also made a list of the above three meme coins. In addition, there are old meme coins such as MOG, POPCAT and GIGA on the list, which have all gained considerable gains recently. The meme coins that Murad called for have one thing in common, that is, they all have some cult temperament.
Cult refers to a highly focused and fanatical following culture, where fans show extreme enthusiasm and loyalty to a specific thing, such as a person, brand, idea or work. This cultural phenomenon usually revolves around a small but influential group, which distinguishes itself from mainstream culture through common beliefs, behaviors or interests. In the field of crypto, what is Cult meme and why should we promote Cult meme? Perhaps it all starts with Murad.
From Bitcoin Supremacist to Cult Meme Godfather, Who is Murad?
If you search Murad Mahmudov on Google, in addition to the recent very popular speech (Meme Coin Super Cycle), there are also Murad’s interviews and articles about Bitcoin before 2022 - (The Ultimate Argument for Bitcoin), (The Past and Future of Bitcoin), etc. From the title, you can see that he is a pure Bitcoin supremacist.
Murad graduated from Princeton University and went to China for a one-year exchange program in 2013, where he met an American in Beijing’s foreign circle - the fifth employee of OK Coin. Through this friend, Murad learned about cryptocurrency and began his crypto journey.
But before 2016, Murad did not devote himself to the crypto field full-time, but worked in traditional financial institutions such as Goldman Sachs and Glencore. After resigning, Murad became a Bitcoin Maxi. Since 2017, Murad has done a lot in the crypto field, writing on-chain analysis articles, doing trading investments, and participating in the development of DeFi. In 2018, Murad established a community of tens of thousands of people and was once considered one of the leading Bitcoin analysts. His portfolio grew fivefold in just seven months.
In 2019, Murad founded a fund called Adaptive Capital, but the good times did not last long. When the market crashed on March 12, 2020, Adaptive Capital could only declare bankruptcy because the fund could not respond appropriately to the sell-off due to "insufficient infrastructure." After the collapse of Adaptive, Murad continued to invest in Bitcoin and startups, but became less active on social media.
In 2022, Murad announced his return to social media and regained his passion for cryptocurrencies. But it was not until this year that Murad found the main task of the new cycle, looking for the real Cult meme. In an interview, he said, "In early 2024, I began to try to understand meme coins from the perspective of first principles." In June, Murad began to share his meme trading philosophy and targets in the community.
Murad's appearance has also changed from a short-haired and slightly shy finance man to an anti-mainstream image with long hair and a beard, which is consistent with the Cult culture he promotes, at least it is not mainstream.
Cult list, how does Murad stir up memes?
From June 25th to September 13th, Murad gradually filled out this list of cult memes that he believed would explode in the next meme super cycle.
As Murad became popular, the list became the new trading bible, with the market value of SPX, led by SPX, rising from $20 million in July to more than $600 million, and many people imitating this format to make their own lists.
Why did Murad choose these meme coins? In the interview, he summarized the meme coin screening criteria as follows:
Focus on mid-cap coins with a market cap between $5 million and $200 million;
Prefer Solana and Ethereum, excluding Base, Ton, and Sui, because whales will park their wealth on the first two;
“These chains are like big bank accounts, and once they really understand that meme coins are going to dominate the altcoin market in this cycle, the money will move very quickly.
Projects that are at least six months old;
“Time is something that cannot be faked and represents a real commitment. Assuming that each of us lives for 80 years, time itself is a very serious resource investment.”
Murad spent six to seven months using Twitter and Telegram accounts to enter the Discord and Telegram groups of various meme coins to understand the atmosphere, culture, and what group members are talking about. "Investing in memes is actually investing in people." Murad believes that Cult will become the next big trend. By studying indicators such as on-chain data, market value, holder distribution, degree of decentralization, and avoiding leading derivative coins, political coins, celebrity coins, most animal coins, newly launched popular coins, and KOL shouting coins, he screened out the Cult meme mentioned above.
Murad’s screening criteria is simply to select tokens that have been around for at least six months and have experienced at least two 70% crashes.
Today’s meme coin market is divided into different tiers. Large funds may choose to buy blue-chip meme coins with a high market value and the potential to double. On the other hand, some investors will gamble on platforms such as Pump.Fun, hoping to turn 2 SOL into 20 SOL.
Murad believes that he is in the middle of the two, focusing on finding undervalued meme coins that meet most of his screening criteria. These projects may have only one or two indicators that are not up to standard, but they are easy to improve. At the same time, they have extremely enthusiastic community support and are relatively cheap. Murad calls this strategy the "Price and Belief Index" and believes that investors should look for projects where faith is extremely high but prices are still low.
The meme coin supercycle
The "Price and Belief Index" is usually only applicable to meme coins, because the success of Pump.Fun and Polymarket tells us that good crypto products do not necessarily need tokens, and Murad believes that the best tokens do not need products, such as PEPE and WIF. The counterexample may be those meme coins that are doing things seriously.
But the absence of a product does not mean the absence of use. Murad believes that the best meme coins have more functions than almost all altcoins. They provide fun, reduce loneliness, and identity recognition - achieving the goals that DAO was supposed to achieve, bringing resonance, emotional connection, a sense of mission and meaning, entertainment, and happiness, and even promoting charity, story creation, and legend building.
Murad's speech, source: YouTube
In his speech at TOKEN 2049, Murad pushed the argument that meme coins will subvert VC coins and even all altcoins to the extreme. The core of the meme coin super cycle he mentioned is that people in the market are gradually realizing that meme coins are stealing meme attributes and speculative premiums from value coins. "Any crypto asset that does not distribute cash flow to your wallet or is not used as a store of value is essentially a meme coin. 99.999% of altcoins are just meme coins plus more steps."
DeFi investor RedSkull bluntly stated that future crypto projects will only be divided into those with revenue and those without. "If your project has no revenue, then it is a meme, competing with other memes to see who is more worthy of speculative premium; if it belongs to the category of revenue, it is mainly based on revenue competition, and is compared according to standard price-to-earnings multiples."
As for how to measure the changes brought about by this 20-minute speech, on the one hand, the cult memes that Murad "called out" did rise a lot, and on the other hand, it attracted many people who were not keen on meme trading before, and even influenced some institutional VCs to say that they would put meme coins into their investment portfolios.
It is enough to see that Murad has injected new vitality into the meme coin market, thanks to his mature and systematic understanding and screening criteria for memes, and perhaps also due to his trading and analysis experience in the field of Bitcoin in previous years. However, why did Murad change from a Bitcoin supremacist to the meme godfather who now cheers for Cult?
The ultimate vision of meme philosophy
To understand Murad’s meme philosophy, perhaps we have to start with the origin of Bitcoin.
As a crypto OG who has been exposed to Bitcoin since 2013, Murad has grown up with Bitcoin and the Bitcoin community culture. A large number of blogs, books, and literary works by Bitcoin maximalists about Bitcoin provide a perfect foundation for Murad to understand and study meme coins.
Murad believes that the rise of meme coins is a byproduct of the cryptocurrency industrial system, which itself is a byproduct of the fiat currency system, so the existence and emergence of meme coins are driven by external forces, which is similar to the fact that Bitcoin was inspired by the economic crisis - the monetary system is collapsing, but the manifestations of Bitcoin and meme coins are completely opposite, like the two ends of a horseshoe.
On the one hand, the crisis pushes people to more robust alternatives, namely Bitcoin. On the other hand, the collapse of the fiat currency system will also push people towards speculative behavior, which is especially evident in times of inflation, when people’s money cannot maintain its value, so they will choose to take risks and gamble.
This structural reason leads Murad to believe that meme coins will have the same extreme cultural effect as Bitcoin, almost a new kind of religious fanaticism, and their holders will also show this fanaticism.
This is the fundamental reason why Murad advocates Cult meme, and the list of books given by Murad also proves this point. The materials he studied meme include (The Future of Religion and the Religion of the Future), (American Gods), (No Anti-meme Department), (Spectacle Society), etc. The research done in these books is about the evolution of beliefs and ideologies, cultural and social dynamics, and information dissemination mechanisms. They are helpful for understanding the nature of memes, their dissemination mechanisms, and their profound impact on individuals and society.
Murad's recommended meme research book list, source: X
After being influenced by these books, some of Murad's tweets have become similar to Nawal's, using short and concise sentences to share some meme-related philosophies.
“The key to finding undervalued meme coins is emotion, they need to make you feel something.”
“The lower the global fertility rate, the higher the value of cult memes will be, because children give people meaning in life, and if fewer people have children, they will look for meaning elsewhere.”
“Excess money supply + excessive loneliness + scarcity of meaning = money flows to overly speculative assets. Since there is “more money” and “more loneliness” in the system than there were four years ago, assets need to be more speculative than they are in 2021.”
“The additional service that cult memes provide compared to regular memes is a heightened sense of relative safety. This safety comes down to community cohesion and the personalities of the top 300 most active members, which permeates the overall culture and atmosphere of the meme.”
In Murad's view, meme is not a track, but a culture and attribute. To put it abstractly, meme is about meaning, while cult meme has even more grandiose imagination.
Become the next religion
If you answer more directly what a cult meme is, Murad's answer is that a group of people get together for a certain reason with extreme enthusiasm. "The ultimate dream of meme coins is to become the next religion, so you have to hang out in their Discord, Telegram and social spaces to see how cult, passionate and religious the community is."
Extreme fanaticism is the characteristic of religion. In essence, religion can provide a variety of different things to its audience. For some people, religion provides community, for some people, it provides guidance, and for others, religion provides an object of faith and a sense of belonging, a sense of transcendence. Of course, religion also provides some lifestyle advice, answers to some very difficult questions about existence, and so on. And these are all things that the future cult meme can do.
If cryptocurrency is a religion, it is a religion centered on a revolution in money, finance, and commerce. Gods are fungible, narratives are flexible, financial expectations are scalable, and cryptocurrency replaces "we believe in God" with "we believe in our coins."
Related reading: (Encryption is still a belief)
Matti of Zee Prime Capital believes that meme coins themselves are just a social game of ups and downs, a new form of lottery, vaguely associated with the grasp of the spirit of the times. But meme coins still have a broader space, and the current form of meme coins is still very rudimentary because they do not focus on sustainability, but pursue rapid pull-ups and shipments, and price increases have become the most effective marketing tool.
However, future meme coins can go beyond this, and price increases are only a means to achieve a greater goal - meme coins are not only a carrier of culture, but also carry a distribution function, so that they not only stay at the level of funny memes, but are closely integrated with lifestyle products to form a real cultural phenomenon.
