Hosts: Fraokh; Tyler; Mando; @FOMOHOUR
Guest: Murad Mahmudov
Original translation: zhouzhou, BlockBeats
Editor's Note: In this article, Murad shares how he entered the cryptocurrency field and gradually formed his own Meme investment thesis. He discussed how to choose Meme, why he thinks Meme launched in 2023 will be better, and how he tested and verified his investment strategy. Murad emphasized the connection between NFT and Meme, and believes that Meme will have a huge upside in 2025, and put forward the view that belief is more important than short-term trading.
TL;DR：
Murad's journey into crypto: He came into contact with crypto while studying in China, and believes that 2025 will be a year of great opportunities in the crypto field, especially Meme. Meme is, to some extent, a counterattack against VC.
Meme investment strategy: I am aware of the explosion of Meme, but it takes at least seven to eight months to build a belief, so I think Meme will be the biggest winner in 2023.
Explore the market trends of Meme: Look for leaders in the Meme category. Those with a long history, a community, and a suitable market value will have a better risk-return ratio. Currently, Meme is still in its early stages, and anti-VC sentiment will be higher next year.
How do you view the current development of the NFT field: Meme and NFT are the same thing, but the scale of my Meme will be larger, and the NFT projects that will perform well in the future will definitely be those linked to Meme.
The following is the original text of the conversation (there are three hosts in the podcast. To facilitate reading and understanding, the hosts are collectively referred to as hosts, and the original content has been deleted and reorganized):
Murad :
This is not a trader’s market, this is a believer’s market. We are no longer looking at technical analysis, range trading, or market timing, the top memes of AC and Krypton could rise 30x, 50x, or even 100x regardless of market cap. It all seems like a mirage, elusive.
Host: Our co-host Tyler loved your lists so much that he did a special index analysis for them. We are in the midst of a FOMO moment right now, so I have a few questions for you. I personally would love to know more about your background and how you got to where you are today.
Murad’s Journey into Cryptocurrency
Murad: I am from Azerbaijan and went to the United States for college. During that time, I spent a year as an exchange student in China, around the end of 2013 to the beginning of 2014, which coincided with the famous 2013 Bitcoin bubble, four years before the 2017 bubble. I was lucky to have several foreign friends who participated in the early Bitcoin ecosystem, which was my first exposure to Bitcoin.
By 2016, when Bitcoin and Ethereum became the focus again, I had already started to pay close attention and realized that I needed to take cryptocurrencies more seriously. Before that, I worked in the field of commodity trading and logistics. Since 2017, I have done a lot of things in the crypto field, writing on-chain analysis articles, trading and investing, and participating in the construction of decentralized finance. In 2019, I founded a fund, but unfortunately it did not perform well. Now I am building a decentralized financial trading protocol, a social financial trading protocol called SDFX. In addition, I have also participated in a lot of Meme investments and transactions, and studied Meme from the perspective of on-chain and data analysis.
Host: How do you feel about being the "protagonist" now? Your interview with Token 2049 caused quite a stir. How do you feel about it now?
Murad: I try to face this with grace and humility. In fact, I think we still have 8 to 14 months of meme craze to go through. So I say to my friends who are involved in meme, we need to try to stay calm and patient, and not celebrate or be impulsive before 2026. I think 2025 will be a huge opportunity year in the crypto field, especially meme, and we need to be prepared to seize this wave of opportunities.
Moderator: You shared your core idea in your Token 2049 speech. How did you come up with this idea? How long did you prepare for it? Where did this idea come from?
Murad: In addition to cryptocurrencies themselves, the outside world is also changing. Inflationary pressures are still ongoing, and the global money supply is increasing. Those who are familiar with the Bitcoin maximalist literature from 2015, 2016 know that this has an impact on people's mental health, financial markets, the nature of assets, how they are traded, and even on a chemical level to an emotional level. I think all of these factors are also affecting the crypto market in microcosm, which is why every four years the mainstream altcoin narrative and the core altcoin themes are getting more and more crazy.
So it's not surprising that memes dominate the market now, because we've seen this trend since around 2013, when altcoins first appeared. At that time, altcoins were all about using blockchain to do this and using decentralization to do that. Now that it's been almost a decade, I think people have begun to accept the harsh truth that the actual application scenarios of blockchain technology are much less than people have advertised.
But some of the use cases we have identified, such as storage, are exactly what Bitcoin is good at; there is also payment, which is mainly a combination of stablecoins and payment rails; and finally, all forms of speculation, all different kinds of speculation, whether it is at the application level or the asset level, you can think of them as the same thing, you can even think of these tokens as tables in a casino. And the reality is that Meme now reveals a dark truth, that is, all the altcoins that have ever existed have actually always been Meme, they are just wearing the coat of Silicon Valley and branding it with Silicon Valley.
Like, we hired these distributed systems engineers, we have this Github, we have that Github. But at the end of the day, the retail investors who are really driving the surge and exponential growth, they don’t care about the technology, they care about making money and having fun. That’s the core problem, all of this is essentially a performance art, full of manipulation and marketing, selling $50 billion worth of tokens to people.
Therefore, Meme is a kind of counterattack against this phenomenon to some extent, a populist counterattack from the bottom. Because in 2017, poor people could still get rich by buying ICOs. At that time, at least the initial transaction price of ICOs was low. You could gradually build a community to make the middle class become upper middle class, or make the poor rich. This process is organic, even Chainlink and ByteDance tokens, their initial transaction prices were only around 20 million and 15 million US dollars, which were still relatively affordable.
Frankly speaking, now VC institutions have privatized all the gains in this space, and in private rounds, once the project has liquidity, its valuation has reached 15 billion US dollars. Obviously, you can't build a real community in this situation. So people realize that if it's not the software, then the core value is the token itself, and the community built around it.
I believe that people in their twenties and early thirties have realized that we don’t need to buy VC tokens. They don’t actually have a monopoly on token creation, and the meme wave is essentially a powerful counterattack. It started as revenge against VC, but my bolder view is that this trend will evolve into a much larger and more important phenomenon.
Meme’s investment strategy
Moderator: We basically agree on this, and I think most people in the crypto space see it this way. Like when I entered the industry in 2021, most people in the crypto community were talking about buying altcoins that would go up 100x, but they didn't realize that token economics means you're actually fighting an extremely powerful trend, so we all agree that Meme dominance will get higher and higher.
As you said, the main use case for crypto right now is payments, with Bitcoin maximalists comparing it to "digital gold." Then you have speculation, and memes are a big part of internet culture. So how does the fun part start? How do you choose these memes? Once you've decided that memes are your focus, how do you move to the next stage?
Murad: I quickly realized that platforms like Pump Fun would eventually lead to a massive number of memes, almost everything would have its own meme. So in my mind, I felt it was necessary to do a thought experiment, let's assume that in the future there will be a meme for everything, like every color, every country, every meme, every animal, every picture, even hundreds of millions of memes. On the supply side, these memes are endless; on the demand side, suppose we give everyone in the world $2,000, they have to invest in two or three memes. So combining these two, you start to simulate in your mind and ask yourself, in this environment, which memes will win?
You'll find that probably 70% of people just gamble their money away, which you can already see on platforms like Pump Fun. So what's going to be the other 30%? What will survive and be sustainable? Ultimately it all comes down to the community and the people who are involved. My point is that what you really need is something that is passionate, even to the point of being a fanatic, or even a movement, or dare I say a mini modern religion. These things will eventually become part of people's identity because they touch people's hearts. People will become very engaged, and it's all about emotional resonance and inspiration.
Therefore, to identify which memes will become giants in the future, you need to ask yourself: Which memes are more inspiring? Those memes that can inspire more people will reach a higher market value in 2025. Next, we can delve into some quantitative things, such as how to measure inspiration? How to measure emotion?
Moderator: I agree with you, I actually created a meme myself and it quickly became a religion, these things can go quite smoothly. But I want to go back to the list you mentioned earlier, when I first saw this list, it was actually a little confusing because you seemed to have chosen the coins with the least number of holders, which is not very traditionally the case with other memes.
And, this is obviously a long-term valuation list, and seeing it will inspire some reactions. But I think you seem to have discovered something that others haven't noticed, such as the religious factor, those diamond hands, they will hold these coins as long as possible, especially we may pay more attention to those relatively older coins. I looked through this list, and most of the coins are not actually launched recently. They were launched in the past year, or have been building communities for more than six months, and now it seems that these coins seem to be showing signs of rising.
Murad: I have some bias towards the 2023 or even early 2024 meme. I think time is a very important factor. It takes at least seven to eight months to build a belief, which is why I think the 2023 meme will be the biggest winner. Because you need time for sellers to exit and for the supply of coins to be concentrated in the hands of those who believe in extremely high market capitalization. You saw this with MOG in 2023, and I believe you are seeing similar situations with Harry Potter Bomb now, especially in the range of price fluctuations. SPX has also performed similarly over the past year, and Giga is also the same in the first four to five months of 2024.
To build faith, it takes time for this concept to resonate and gradually penetrate society, and it also takes time for the supply to be concentrated in the hands of true believers, rather than those who will sell for 3x or 4x returns. When the supply is in the hands of true believers, the supply has basically been solved, and the next step is to solve the demand problem. So every time there is an inflow of funds, the price of the currency will rise parabolically, because these believers will not move their coins unless they reach their goals - such as a market value of $100 billion.
It doesn't matter whether you believe in the goal or not, what matters is the belief of the holders because they are the ones who make the decision. So when people talk about belief, it's essentially about belief in the final valuation, belief in friends, belief in the mission, and belief in this meme movement. These are all things you need to dig into.
Moderator: So is your list static or dynamic? Do you plan to add or remove some coins? I know a lot of people are concerned about this question, because whether this is your original intention or not, many people now regard this list as the Murad list.
Murad: I have a lot of responsibility now, and I don’t want to be the guy who pushes coins randomly. I spent 6-7 months, almost in the trenches, using some small Twitter and Telegram accounts, diving into various Discord and Telegram groups to understand the atmosphere, the culture, and the people. So, all my choices are very deliberate and very convincing.
I'm not sure if I'll make any changes to this list, but I'm very confident in this list at this point. One thing I've realized, and it's paid off big time, is that this is not a trader's market, it's a believer's market. Believers are like investors on steroids, metaphorically speaking. Believers understand, forget technical analysis, forget range trading, forget timing, forget rotations. If you think this cycle is going to be like the last three, we may actually be in the fourth year. And in the fourth year, the rabid bull market paranoiacs are going to outperform everyone.
Even the most sophisticated quantitative traders in the world are no match for those diamond holders. Therefore, I firmly believe that you should find a group of beliefs that resonate strongly with you personally, and this resonance can also infect millions of people worldwide, and this is the winning formula. You should buy and hold for the long term. As I mentioned before, I think there is still 8 to 12 months, maybe more. I believe that the top 10 or top 15 memes will have an extreme parabolic rise. The core of my logic is to try to find the leaders in each category. There are different categories of memes now, and these categories will continue to increase.
Explore Meme Market Trends
Host: What I am trying to observe in the Meme field is especially exploring some market segments. Can you talk about this in detail?
Murad: Obviously, you have Dogecoin, which I think is kind of the leader right now. You have cat coins, which I think is the leader of. And then you have the so-called culture coins, like MOG, which I think is the leader of. And then you have SPX, which I classify as a sports coin, which is a whole new category. And then you have Giga, which is a combination of lifestyle, culture and masculinity. And then there are some other smaller categories.
My vision is that category leaders almost always have a better risk-reward ratio. Because whether it is a big whale entering the market or the flow itself, they will always choose the category leader, so it is better to hold the leader in each category. And those who chase the "sub-leader" or the small version of the leader will always lose because it will eventually become a player-to-player competition.
Next, I think this is one of the most important concepts in Meme, the so-called "critical mass". Let's say the critical mass is $200 million. In simple terms, if a coin can reach a market cap of 200 million, it is likely to continue to rise to 1 billion, or even 1.2 billion, 1.5 billion, at least with a high probability. But if it doesn't reach 200 million, it may fall and slowly wither. Therefore, even though there are thousands of Memes, it doesn't matter, because ultimately you should only focus on the top 40 to 50 coins.
Moderator: The earliest Meme investment logic is to find a group of believers, right? But I think what you really did is point out that they must reach a certain "age" before they have enough maturity to allow people to feel this belief while making money. For example, some coins like MOG have risen by millions, but it takes a long time to really transition to the right holders. Even if it survives, you have to find something with religious "belief".
You also have to find these niches, which is similar to the old altcoins. In the past we had different categories of altcoins, and now memes seem to be copying that model, but doing it better. Why buy game coins, DeFi coins, or any of those other altcoin categories? They are often sold off by venture capital (VC) for months or even years. I think these memes have the potential to surpass them and even be stronger than the largest market cap coins.
Murad: The narrative of the "huge rotation" from tech stocks to memes, I think it's still in its early stages, and I think it will continue to happen over the next year. And anti-VC sentiment has not peaked yet, I think it will only get stronger, especially against those VC-invested coins. You also need to understand that about $150 billion of unlocked funds will pour into some altcoin projects in the next four years, which is like inflation. These investors will receive a lot of tokens and start cashing out their profits.
These VC investors are not the true believers you are looking for. On the contrary, the price movements of the truly fanatical believers in a Meme community will far exceed all technical factors. In the final analysis, the essence of the financial market is human behavior and human beliefs. If you go deep into it and participate in various group chats of these VC-backed technology coins and Memes, you will find that Meme supporters are a thousand times more passionate than those of technology coins. And what you are really betting on is this passion, and this is what you are looking for. As long as you find passion, funds will pour in, perhaps millions or even billions of dollars.
Moderator: How did you test and validate your arguments? You said you used smurfs, went into Telegram and Discord groups, and talked to people. I'm wondering, in that process, were there any coins that you thought would make your list that didn't make it because you dug deeper and found that they didn't fit? Was there anything that surprised you in that testing and validation process?
Murad: I developed a series of filters that narrowed down to about 20 to 25 of what I call “belief groups.” What were those filters? First, I didn’t want to buy the biggest memes because many of them were already on big platforms like ByteDance, which had already experienced major catalytic events. I also didn’t want to get involved in “pump fund” type short-term speculative projects.
Over time, it became clear to me that what really matters in the end is the relationship between price and attention, price and "religiosity" or price and passion. I think the greatest value right now is in the mid-cap faith community, and I'm looking at coins with market caps between $5 million and $200 million. I think that's a good range, and that's what I broadly consider to be mid-cap coins.
The second point is that I prefer Solana and Ethereum over other chains. I know there are projects on Base, TON, Sui, etc., but I think the first major driver of these market caps will eventually come from whales holding altcoins. But where will altcoin whales park their wealth? Right now the answer is Ethereum and Solana.
The ETH and SOL tokens they hold represent $70 billion and $300 billion in wealth, respectively, and there are tons of stablecoins out there as well. So these chains are like large bank accounts. Once they really understand that Meme is going to dominate the altcoin market this cycle and next year, the money will flow very quickly. This flow will drive us to see $100 million, $200 million, even $3 billion market caps. So, I'm focused on Ethereum and Solana.
Another important point is that when I screen projects, I mainly look at those that are at least six months old. Because in my opinion, building a faith or community is like an airplane taking off. Before taking off, the airplane needs to accelerate. In this case, acceleration is time, and there is no substitute for time.
Prices can be manipulated, short-term trading volumes can be artificially created, and listings on centralized exchanges can even be artificially arranged, but in the end, time cannot be faked. Assuming that each of us lives for 80 years, time itself is a very serious resource investment. If I see that the market value of a meme has been consolidating below $20 million for a year, it has not exploded, but it has not died, that is a signal worth paying attention to.
I know there is a core group of holders who are constantly absorbing coins from non-believers through regular investments, and that's what I'm looking for. Personally, as you may have noticed, I've found the most success in projects with a market cap of between 10 million and 30 million, or 10 million and 40 million dollars. I think this is a sweet spot that can develop an early belief group without being too expensive. In the past four or five months, I have personally found the most value in this market cap range.
In addition, I hope that the meme itself is unique, and I prefer two types of things: one is the "real" memes like Giga and APU, which have been popular on platforms such as TikTok and Instagram since 2016; the other is those new projects with a certain sports or religious atmosphere. Because for real memes, people are already familiar with them; and for those memes with sports nature, they can inspire higher-level inspiration, which are more "quantitative" things.
As you may have noticed, I am a big fan of projects that are as truly decentralized as possible. I want the supply of the token to be decentralized in general and decentralized in terms of whale holdings. There are projects where the supply is almost entirely controlled by a few large holders, with six people holding 75% of the supply, and we all know those cases.
Host: You have to protect people from being harmed by these "kebab coins".
Murad: If you are a big whale now, or you are a VC or institution considering getting involved in Meme, please hire an on-chain analyst, or on-chain quantitative analyst, and have them look at not only the overall indicators, but also carefully analyze what happened in the earliest blocks, especially the earliest 100 blocks, and the most important thing is the religiousness and inspiration. As I said before, I also want the whale holding group to be decentralized. So, I will pay attention to how many people hold less than 0.3% but more than 0.1% of the tokens, and then break down this data into different groups and holder structures. I hope they are balanced and appear organic. If you plot all this information into a huge matrix, you can see which coins are legitimate and which coins are not.
As I said before, you invest in people, so if you have this opportunity, you need to figure out who the leaders are, or even if there are leaders, what the decision-making process is, who are the biggest whales, who is discussing this project on Twitter, and who is not discussing this project on Twitter.
In addition to all the quantitative factors I mentioned, you also need to feel the atmosphere and culture. Are these people sincere? Or is it another speculative group that only has short-term enthusiasm and will quickly sell your coins? Obviously, you want to look for people who think long-term, at least their thinking is calculated in quarters, preferably years, rather than those who just want to make 10 times quickly and sell next week. So ultimately you need to understand these people, understand their culture, and understand their memes. In addition to all these mathematical indicators, this is the basis for your judgment.
What do you think of the current development of the NFT field?
Moderator: You recently posted about NFTs, right? You reposted that famous Murad list, including the NFT part. I really like to see the Bitcoin puppet in it, and of course my Punk. What do you think of the development of the NFT field now? Many people say that this cycle of memes is like the last cycle of NFTs. Do you agree with this view?
Murad: From a technical point of view, memes and NFTs are the same thing, but I believe that memes will be 50 times larger. The reason is simple. Even in a successful NFT project, if you really calculate the numbers, you will find that there are about 3,000 to 4,000 people promoting 10,000 JPEGs with poor liquidity. The situation of memes is much more efficient and the situation of both parties is more optimized.
Instead of having 3,000 people promoting 10,000 different illiquid JPEGs, you can have 500,000 people promoting the same coin. You can see how much more economical and powerful this approach is from a liquidity perspective, which is why you see crazier parabolic rises in top Memes than BAYC or CryptoPunks. Memes and NFTs are very similar in nature, but the financial instruments that express Memes are better and more efficient, which is why Meme's market cap will be 30x, 50x, or even 100x higher than the peaks of BAYC and CryptoPunks.
In my opinion, the NFT projects that will perform well in this cycle will be those that are linked to Memes. Ideally, it is better to have Memes first and then launch NFT collections, so that the development is more natural and Memes will be given priority.
Here’s why, and why I’m very bullish on Sprout Gram, Eon Lens, Ricardo, and the upcoming ARPU NFT. I think all four of these memes will perform extremely well and their market caps will be in the billions of dollars. This means their communities will become very wealthy, and in the digital realm, it will become a huge social symbol that you are part of these communities.
Additionally, each of these meme “core” members will own one or more of these NFTs, and I think Project Eon, Sproto, Gramons, and Ricardo will be revered as the Patek Philippe, Vacheron Constantin, and Audemars Piguet of the modern meme movement. I even think they might have a floor price of 50 ETH, and if the meme craze gets really crazy, they might go to a floor price of 100 ETH.
I know it sounds crazy now, but if you do the math on illiquid assets — and I know you saw this in late 2021 — their prices can move very quickly. And the human brain is wired to think linearly, and the human brain is very bad at understanding parabolic growth and exponential change. I think these NFTs, especially my favorites like the ones I mentioned, like Programming, Project Eon, and Ritardia, have huge potential going forward.
Moderator: Indeed, things tend to go crazier than anyone expects. For example, Bored Apes went to $400,000 to $500,000 last cycle. Murat, I love that you included Punks in your list, I think it adds more authority to the whole discussion, and I agree with your meme point of view.
How do you plan to exit? Now that you have a kind of "cult" status, everyone is paying attention to your play, such as the "MURAD Index". So, once you start selling, will it all fall apart? Are you worried about this? Have you thought about what will happen in 8 to 12 months or even 14 months? Will it be difficult to exit at that time?
Murad: I would definitely sell some of it in late 2025 or early 2026. For both SPX and Giga, I would definitely hold across multiple cycles because I think they will outlast one cycle and continue to strengthen.
But the thing is, by mid-2025, there will definitely be a meme valuation framework. People will start using Excel spreadsheets, quantitative analysis, and all social media data to determine which are overvalued and which are undervalued. Just like altcoins, there will be periods of undervaluation and overvaluation, and it depends on how you formulate your own entry and exit strategies.
I suggest that you use the DCA method for both entry and exit, which is much better because it is difficult to accurately grasp the market timing. Maybe you are very good and can grasp the specific month or quarter. But in general, DCA entry and exit is the most conservative method. In the long run, it performs much better than all-in and all-out at once.
Host: Mando, you made a fortune on the Bored Apes project, what do you think of Murad's NFT theory?
Moderator Mando: I think it’s quite interesting, because I actually think that NFT is naturally more suitable for meme-ization in terms of community building, and is better than meme. I found that in the Telegram or Discord groups of NFT, the focus of discussion is often not just the price, people associate it more with personal identity.
In Meme discussions, price is often the main topic, and while there are Meme conferences, there are no NFT conferences. Maybe this will change, and this element of "belief" that you mentioned may get us there. But I do agree that Meme may be further than the top NFT projects in terms of market capitalization. Because the nature of Meme determines that it can have tens of thousands of holders, while an NFT project has at most 10,000 holders. However, the real core community is more like "Seal Team 6", while the Meme community is more decentralized.
Murad: The success of NFT projects can sometimes become their own enemy, because the floor price becomes high and low-income people cannot participate. Meme is different, you can participate at any price point.
Host: How do you respond to those who question your views? We discussed at the beginning of the show that many people think you are a "protagonist", but some people think that everything you say is delusional, unfeasible, etc. How do you deal with it?
Murad: I am more than happy for people to think I am delusional because it means we are still early. If everyone agreed with me, there would be no economic opportunity. I welcome all the criticism, doubt, and even the label of "delusional" because it only tells me that we have more room to grow.
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