It seems that the meme coin craze 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 was ignited by the meme pre-sales 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 Pump.Fun, led the way, further boosted the meme hype by upgrading its infrastructure, triggering the third wave of meme fever. After weathering the so-called September curse, the crypto market has once again seen a new wave of trading frenzy, with new internet-famous animals becoming the top meme stars. However, recently, the abstract art movement has returned to the market, bringing a new wave of meme speculation momentum.
Yesterday, on-chain detective ZachXBT publicly revealed the wallet address of shill master Murad Mahmudov, sparking heated discussion 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 following.
Murad, the recently rising meme coin KOL, gained widespread attention in the crypto circle thanks to his speech on the super cycle of meme coins at the TOKEN2049 conference. He had boldly predicted that Bitcoin would reach $10 million, and is now seen as the next generation top influencer after meme master Ansem, and his ability to shill has been highly effective.
In the address disclosed by ZachXBT, Murad holds three meme coins: SPX, APU, and MINI, and on Twitter, Murad has also created 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 significant gains recently. The meme coins that Murad shills have a common feature - they all have a certain Cult-like quality.
Cult refers to a highly focused and fanatical following culture, where fans express extreme passion and loyalty towards a particular thing, such as a person, brand, idea, or work, and this cultural phenomenon usually revolves around a niche but influential group, distinguishing themselves from the mainstream culture through shared beliefs, behaviors, or interests. In the crypto realm, what is a Cult meme, and why should Cult memes be advocated? Perhaps we need to start with the person Murad.
From Bitcoin maximalist to Cult meme godfather, who is Murad?
If you search for Murad Mahmudov on Google, aside from his recent hot "meme coin super cycle" speech, you'll find Murad's interviews and articles about Bitcoin from before 2022 - "The Ultimate Bitcoin Argument", "The Past and Future of Bitcoin", and so on, the titles of which show 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 like 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 even participating in DeFi development work. In 2018, Murad founded a community with tens of thousands of people, and was once considered one of the leading Bitcoin analysts, with his investment portfolio growing 5-fold 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 March 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 passion 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 sharing his meme trading philosophy and targets in the community.
Murad's appearance has also changed from a short-haired, slightly shy finance guy to a long-haired, bearded non-mainstream figure, 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 memes that he believes will explode in the upcoming meme super cycle.
With Murad's rise to fame, this list has also become the new trading bible, with SPX leading the way, its market cap rising from $20 million in July to over $600 million, and many have imitated this format to list their own lists.
Why did Murad choose these meme coins? In interviews, he summarized the meme coin screening criteria as follows:
Focus on mid-cap coins between $5 million and $200 million;
Inclined towards Solana and Ethereum, excluding Base, Ton, and Sui, because whales will park their wealth on the former two;
These chains are like large bank accounts, and once they truly understand that meme coins will dominate the altcoin market in this cycle, capital flows will be very rapid.
Projects with at least six months of history;
Time 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 participate in the Discord and Telegram groups of various meme coins, understanding their atmosphere, culture, and what the group members were talking about. "Investing in meme coins 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 memes mentioned earlier.
Murad's screening criteria can be simply summarized as selecting 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, where large-scale capital may choose to buy blue-chip meme coins with the potential to double, while on the other hand, some investors will gamble on platforms like Pump.Fun, hoping to turn 2 SOL into 20 SOL.
Murad believes he is in the middle of the two, focusing on finding undervalued meme coins that meet most of his screening criteria, but may only lack one or two indicators that are easily improved, and have an extremely passionate community support, and relatively low prices. Murad calls this strategy the "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
And the "price and faith index" is usually only applicable to meme coins, because the success of Pump.Fun and Polymarket tells us a truth - good crypto products don't necessarily need tokens, and Murad believes the best tokens don't need products either, like PEPE and WIF, while the counterexamples may be those meme coins that are seriously doing business.
But the lack of a product does not mean a lack of utility, Murad believes that the best meme coins have far more functionality than almost all Altcoins, as they provide entertainment, reduce loneliness, offer identity - achieving the original goals of DAO, bringing resonance, emotional connection, a sense of mission and meaning, entertainment and a sense of well-being, and even driving charitable causes, story creation and legend building.
Murad's speech scene, source: YouTube
In his speech at TOKEN2049, Murad took the narrative of meme coins overthrowing VC coins and all Altcoins to the extreme, the core of the meme coin super cycle he described 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 allocate cash flows to your wallet or does not serve as a store of value is essentially a meme coin, 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 revenue and those without, "If your project has no revenue, 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 revenue-generating category, then the main competition is based on revenue, and it is compared according to the standard price-to-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.
This is enough to see that Murad has injected new vitality into the meme coin market, which is due to his very mature and systematic understanding and screening standards of meme, 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. The vast 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 currency 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 just like Bitcoin, and can almost be seen as a new type of religious fervor, and their holders will also exhibit this kind of fervor.
This is the fundamental reason why Murad advocates Cult meme, and Murad's reading list also proves this point, his research materials on meme include "The Future of Religion and the Religion of the Future", "American Gods", "No Anti-Meme Department", "The Society of the Spectacle", etc., these books all focus on the evolution of beliefs and ideologies, cultural and social dynamics, and information dissemination mechanisms, which are helpful for understanding the essence of meme, its dissemination mechanism, and its profound impact on individuals and society.
Murad's recommended meme research reading list, 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.
1. The key to finding undervalued meme coins is emotion, they need to make you feel something.
2. The lower the global birth rate, the higher the market cap of Cult meme, because children give people meaning in life, and if there are fewer and fewer people with children, they will seek meaning elsewhere.
3. Excess money supply + excessive loneliness + scarcity of meaning = capital flowing to overly speculative assets, since there is "more money" and "more loneliness" in the system than four years ago, the assets need to be more speculative than the assets of 2021.
4. Compared to ordinary meme, the extra service provided by Cult meme 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, meme is not a track, but a culture and attribute, to put it abstractly, meme is about meaning, and Cult meme has even more grandiose imagination.
Becoming the Next Religion
If we answer more directly what 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 their community has."
Extreme fanaticism is the characteristic of religion. Essentially, religion can provide various things for the audience, for some it provides a community, for some it provides guidance, for others it 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 all of these, the future Cult meme can do.
If cryptocurrency is a religion, it is a religion centered on currency, finance and business revolution. The gods here are replaceable, the narratives are flexible, the financial expectations are scalable, and cryptocurrency replaces "we believe in God" with "we believe in our coin".
Zee Prime Capital's Matti believes that meme coins themselves are just a social game of ups and downs, a new form of lottery, vaguely related to the grasp of the spirit of the times. But meme coins have a broader space, the current form of meme coins is still very primitive, because they do not focus on sustainability, but pursue rapid price increase and dumping, price increase has become the most effective marketing means.
However, the future meme coins can go beyond this, price increase is just a means to achieve a greater goal - meme coins are not only the carrier 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.
