It seems that the meme coin sector is experiencing a new wave of hype this week.
At the end of last year, the first wave of Solana meme coins represented by MYRO, SILLY, and WIF sparked a meme frenzy; the second wave of meme hype originated from the meme pre-sale craze of BOME and SLERF in March this year. Subsequently, the voices criticizing VC coins gradually spread, and more and more meme coins were listed on CEXs, gradually gaining greater acceptance; accompanied by the bear market, altcoins generally performed poorly, while the meme trading tool led by Pump.Fun further promoted the meme hype by upgrading the infrastructure, leading to the outbreak of the third wave of meme fever. After weathering the so-called September curse, the crypto market has ushered in a new wave of trading frenzy, with new internet celebrity animals becoming the top meme coins. But recently, the abstract faction has returned to the market, bringing a new wave of meme hype momentum.
The market cap changes of the meme coin sector over the past year, source: CoinMarketCap
Yesterday, on-chain detective ZachXBT publicly revealed the wallet address of the shill master Murad Mahmudov, which quickly sparked heated discussions in the crypto community - should an uncriminal crypto user be "doxed" in this way? ZachXBT's reason is that people should make wiser decisions about the tokens they buy, rather than just following KOLs with a large number of followers.
Murad, the recently popular meme coin KOL, completely ignited the crypto circle with his speech on the super cycle of meme coins at the TOKEN 2049 conference. He had boldly predicted that Bitcoin would reach $10 million, and is now considered the next generation of top influencers after the meme master Ansem, and the reason he can inherit the mantle is that Murad's shilling is very effective.
In the address disclosed by ZachXBT, Murad holds three meme coins: SPX, APU, and MINI, and on Twitter, Murad has also made a list containing the above three meme coins, as well as some old-school meme coins like MOG, POPCAT, and GIGA, all of which have seen considerable gains recently. And the meme coins that Murad shills have a common feature, which is that they all have a certain Cult quality.
Cult refers to a highly focused and fanatical following culture, where fans express extreme enthusiasm and loyalty to a particular thing, such as a person, brand, idea or work, and this cultural phenomenon is usually centered around a niche but influential group, which distinguishes itself from the mainstream culture through shared beliefs, behaviors or interests. In the crypto field, what is Cult meme, and why should Cult meme be advocated, perhaps it all starts with the person Murad.
From Bitcoin maximalist to Cult meme patriarch, who is Murad?
If you search for Murad Mahmudov on Google, apart from his recent hot speech on the "meme coin super cycle", there are interviews and articles about Bitcoin he wrote before 2022 - "The Ultimate Bitcoin Argument", "The Past and Future of Bitcoin", etc., from the titles you can see that he is a pure Bitcoin maximalist.
Murad graduated from Princeton University and went to China for a year of exchange study in 2013, where he met an American in the Beijing expat circle - the 5th employee of OKCoin, and through this friend, Murad learned about cryptocurrencies and began his crypto journey.
But before 2016, Murad did not fully immerse himself in the crypto field, 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 of things in the crypto field, writing on-chain analysis articles, doing trading and investment, and also participating in the development of DeFi. In 2018, Murad set up a community with tens of thousands of people, and was once considered one of the leading Bitcoin analysts, and his investment portfolio grew 5 times in just 7 months.
In 2019, Murad founded a fund called Adaptive Capital, but the good times didn't last long, and in 2020, due to "insufficient infrastructure", the fund was unable to respond properly to the 3/12 crash, and Adaptive Capital had to declare bankruptcy. 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 rekindled his enthusiasm for crypto. But it wasn't until this year that Murad found a new cycle's main task, to find the true Cult meme, and he said in an interview that "it wasn't until early 2024 that I started trying to understand meme coins from 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, slightly shy financial man to a long-haired, bearded counterculture image, which is consistent with the Cult culture he promotes, at least they are not mainstream.
Cult list, how does Murad shill meme?
From June 25 to September 13, Murad gradually filled this list of Cult meme that he believes will explode in the upcoming meme super cycle.
With the rise of Murad, this list has also become the new trading bible, with SPX leading the way, its market cap has grown from $20 million in July to over $600 million, and many people have imitated this format to list their own lists.
Why did Murad choose these meme coins? In the interview, he summarized the meme coin screening criteria as follows:
Focus on medium-sized market cap coins between $5 million and $200 million;
Tend to favor Solana and Ethereum, excluding Base, Ton, and Sui, because whales will park their wealth on the former two;
"These chains are like big bank accounts, and once they really understand that meme coins will dominate the altcoin market in this cycle, the flow of funds will be very rapid.
Projects with at least six months of history;
"Time is something that cannot be faked, it represents real commitment. Assuming our lifespan is 80 years, time itself is a very serious resource investment."
Murad spent six to seven months using Twitter sub-accounts and Telegram accounts to join the Discord and Telegram groups of various meme coins, understanding their atmosphere, culture, and what the group members were talking about. "Investing in meme is actually investing in people," Murad believes that Cult will become the next big trend, and by studying on-chain data, market value, holder distribution, decentralization, and avoiding derivative coins, political coins, celebrity coins, most animal coins, newly launched hot coins and KOL shill coins, he has screened out the Cult meme mentioned above.
Murad's screening criteria are simply to select tokens that have existed for at least six months and have experienced at least two 70% crashes.
The current meme coin market has already divided into different levels, large-scale capital may choose to buy the top market cap meme coins with the potential to double, on the other hand, some investors will gamble on platforms like Pump.Fun, hoping to turn 2 SOL into 20 SOL.
Murad believes that he is in the middle of the two, focusing on finding those undervalued meme coins that meet most of his screening criteria, these projects may only have one or two indicators that have not yet reached the standard, but are easy to improve, and have an extremely enthusiastic community support, and the price is still relatively low, Murad calls this strategy "price and faith index", believing that investors should look for projects with extremely high faith but still low prices.
The Super Cycle of meme Coins
The "price and belief index" is usually only applicable to meme coins, because the success of Pump.Fun and Polymarket tells us a truth - good crypto products do not necessarily need tokens, and Murad believes that the best tokens do not need products either, such as PEPE and WIF, while the counterexamples may be those meme coins that are doing serious business.
But the lack of a product does not mean a lack of usefulness. Murad believes that the best meme coins have far more functions than almost all Altcoins - they provide fun, reduce loneliness, and identity - achieving the goals that DAOs were originally supposed to achieve, bringing resonance, emotional connection, a sense of mission and meaning, entertainment and happiness, and even driving charitable causes, story creation and legend building.
Murad's speech scene, source: YouTube
In his speech at TOKEN 2049, Murad pushed the narrative of meme coins overthrowing VC coins and even all Altcoins to the extreme, and the core of the meme coin super cycle he spoke of is that people in the market are gradually realizing that meme coins are stealing the meme attributes and speculative premium from value coins. "Any crypto asset that does not distribute cash flow to your wallet or serve as a store of value is essentially a meme coin, and 99.999% of Altcoins are just meme coins with more steps."
DeFi investor RedSkull directly stated that future crypto projects will only be divided into those with income and those without. "If your project has no income, then it belongs to meme, and it competes with other memes to see who is more worthy of speculative premium; if it belongs to the income-generating category, then the main competition is based on income, and it is compared according to the standard price-earnings ratio."
To say how to measure the changes brought about by this 20-minute speech, on the one hand, the Cult memes that Murad "shilled" have indeed risen a lot, and on the other hand, it has pried open many people who were not previously enthusiastic about meme trading, and even influenced some institutional VCs, who said they would include meme coins in their investment portfolios.
It is clear that Murad has injected new vitality into the meme coin market, which is due to his mature and systematic understanding and screening standards of memes, and perhaps also due to his trading and analysis experience in the Bitcoin field in previous years. However, why did Murad change from Bitcoin maximalism to the current high-profile Cult meme patriarch?
The Ultimate Vision of meme Philosophy
To understand Murad's meme philosophy, we may need to start with the origin of Bitcoin.
As a crypto OG who has been involved in 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 have provided a perfect foundation for Murad to understand and research meme coins.
Murad believes that the rise of meme coins is a byproduct of the crypto industry system, which in turn is a byproduct of the fiat currency system, so the existence and emergence of meme coins is driven by external forces, which is similar to the inspiration for Bitcoin coming from 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 is driving people to turn to more stable alternatives, which is Bitcoin. On the other hand, the collapse of the fiat currency system will also drive people to engage in speculative behavior, which is particularly evident in times of hyperinflation when people's money cannot hold its value, so they will choose to take risks and gamble.
This structural reason makes Murad believe that meme coins will have an extreme cultural effect like Bitcoin, and can almost be seen as a new type of religious fervor, and their holders will also exhibit this kind of fanaticism.
This is the fundamental reason why Murad advocates Cult memes, and the booklist he provides also proves this point. His research materials on memes include "The Future of Religion and the Religion of the Future", "American Gods", "No Anti-Meme Department", "Society of the Spectacle", etc., which all study the evolution of beliefs and ideologies, cultural and social dynamics, and information dissemination mechanisms, which are helpful for understanding the essence, dissemination mechanism, and profound impact of memes on individuals and society.
Murad's recommended meme research booklist, source: X
Murad's tweeting style has also become similar to Nassim Taleb's after being immersed in these books, sharing some meme-related philosophies in short and concise sentences.
"The key to finding undervalued meme coins is emotion - they need to make you feel something."
"The lower the global birth rate, the higher the market cap of Cult memes, because children give people meaning in life, and if there are fewer and fewer people with children, they will seek meaning elsewhere."
"Excess money supply + excessive loneliness + scarcity of meaning = capital flowing to overly speculative assets, as there is 'more money' and 'more loneliness' in the system than four years ago, so assets need to be more speculative than 2021 assets."
"Compared to ordinary memes, the extra service provided by Cult memes is a higher relative sense of security. This security boils down to community cohesion and the personalities of the top 300 most active members, which permeate the overall culture and atmosphere of the meme."
In Murad's view, memes are not a track, but a culture and attribute, and to put it more abstractly, memes are about meaning, and Cult memes have even grander imaginations.
Becoming the Next Religion
If we answer more directly what a Cult meme is, Murad's answer is a group of people who are extremely fanatically gathered together for some reason. "The ultimate dream of meme coins is to become the next religion, so you need to hang out in their Discord, Telegram and social spaces to see how much Cult, passion and religious atmosphere there is in that community."
Extreme fanaticism is the characteristic of religion. Essentially, religion can provide various things for the audience - for some, religion provides a community, for others, it provides guidance, and for others, religion provides an object of faith and a sense of belonging, a feeling of transcending the self. 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 memes can do.
If crypto is a religion, it is a religion centered on currency, finance and business revolution. The gods here are interchangeable, the narratives are flexible, and the financial expectations are scalable - crypto replaces "we believe in God" with "we believe in our coins".
Related reading: Crypto is Still Faith
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 a grasp of the spirit of the times. But meme coins have a broader space, as the current form of meme coins is still very primitive, because they do not focus on sustainability, but pursue rapid price increase and dumping, with price increase becoming the most effective marketing means.
However, future meme coins can go beyond this, and price increase is just a means to achieve a greater goal - meme coins are not only carriers of culture, but also bear the function of distribution, making them not only stay at the level of funny memes, but closely combined with lifestyle products, forming a real cultural phenomenon.
