Meme coins seem to have ushered in a new round of hype this cycle. 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.
Since then, the voices condemning VC coins have gradually spread, and more and more meme coins have been listed on CEXs, gradually gaining greater acceptance; accompanied by the bull market turning bearish, Altcoins generally performed poorly, while the meme trading tool Pump.Fun, led the way, further promoted the meme hype by upgrading its infrastructure, triggering the third wave of meme tides. After weathering the so-called September curse, the crypto market has ushered in a new round of trading frenzy, with new-born internet celebrity animals becoming the top meme. But recently, the abstract 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 released the wallet address of the call signal master Murad Mahmudov, which quickly sparked heated discussions in the crypto community - should an unindicted 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 large followings.
Murad, the recently rising meme coin KOL, owes his fame to his speech on the "super cycle of meme coins" at the TOKEN2049 conference, which completely ignited the crypto circle. 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 call signals are very 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 considerable gains recently. And the meme coins that Murad calls have a common feature, which is that they all have a certain Cult quality.
Cult refers to a highly focused, fanatical following culture, where fans express extreme passion and loyalty to 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 field, what is a Cult meme, and why should we advocate for Cult meme, perhaps we need to start with the person Murad.
From Bitcoin maximalist to Cult meme patriarch, who is Murad?
If you search for Murad Mahmudov on Google, aside from his recent hot lecture on the "super cycle of meme coins", you'll find Murad's interviews and articles on Bitcoin before 2022 - "The Ultimate Case for Bitcoin", "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, went to China for a year of exchange study in 2013, and here he met an American in the Beijing expat circle - the 5th employee of OKCoin, through this friend, Murad learned about cryptocurrencies and began his crypto journey.
But until 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 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, during the 3/12 crash, the fund was unable to respond properly to the sell-off due to "inadequate infrastructure", 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 mission, to find the true Cult meme, as he said in an interview, "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 financial man to a long-haired, bearded counter-mainstream image, which is consistent with the Cult culture he promotes, at least they are not mainstream.
List of Cults, How Does Murad Pump Memes?
From June 25 to September 13, Murad has been gradually filling 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, with a market cap rising 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 selection 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 in the former two;
- At least have a six-month history of the project;
Murad spent six to seven months using Twitter sub-accounts and Telegram accounts to understand the atmosphere, culture, and what people were talking about in the Discord and Telegram groups of various meme coins. "Investing in memes is actually investing in people," Murad believes that Cults will become the next big trend, through on-chain data research, market value, holder distribution, decentralization degree and other indicators, as well as avoiding derivative coins of leaders, political coins, celebrity coins, most animal coins, newly launched hot coins and KOL-recommended coins, he has screened out the Cult memes mentioned above.
Murad's screening criteria is simply to select tokens that have existed for at least six months and have experienced at least two 70% crashes.
The meme coin market has now divided into different levels, large-scale capital may choose to buy blue-chip meme coins with high market cap and potential for doubling, 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, 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 passionate community support, and relatively low prices, 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
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 do not necessarily need tokens, and Murad believes that the best tokens do not need products either, such as PEPE and WIF, the counterexamples may be those meme coins that are seriously doing business.
But no product does not mean no use, Murad believes that the best meme coins have more functions than almost all altcoins, they provide fun, reduce loneliness, identity - realize the original goals of DAO, bring resonance, emotional connection, sense of mission and meaning, entertainment and happiness, and even drive charity, story creation and legend building.
Murad's lecture screen, source: YouTube
In his TOKEN2049 lecture, Murad pushed the narrative of meme coins overthrowing VC coins and all altcoins to the extreme, 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 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 income and those without income, "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, compared according to the standard price-earnings ratio."
To say how to measure the changes brought about by this 20-minute lecture, on the one hand, the Cult memes that Murad "called out" have indeed risen a lot, on the other hand, it has also mobilized 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 criteria of memes, and perhaps also thanks 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 Father"?
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 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 robust alternatives, which is Bitcoin. On the other hand, the collapse of the fiat currency system will also drive people towards speculative behavior, which is particularly evident in times of inflation 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 be seen as a new type of religious fanaticism, and their holders will also exhibit this kind of fanaticism.
This is the fundamental reason why Murad advocates the Cult meme, and Murad's recommended reading list also proves this point. His research on memes includes books such as "The Future of Religion and the Religion of the Future", "American Gods", "No Anti-Meme Department", and "The Society of the Spectacle". These books focus on the evolution of beliefs and ideologies, cultural and social dynamics, and information dissemination mechanisms, which are helpful for understanding the essence of memes, their dissemination mechanisms, and their profound impact on individuals and society.
Murad's recommended meme research reading list, image 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 value 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 into overly speculative assets, as the system has "more money" and "more loneliness" than four years ago, the assets need to be more speculative than the assets of 2021."
"Compared to ordinary memes, the additional 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. 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 that community has."
Extreme fanaticism is the characteristic of religion. Fundamentally, religion can provide various things for the audience, for some it provides a community, for others it provides guidance, and for others it provides objects of faith and a sense of belonging and transcendence. Of course, religion also provides some lifestyle advice and answers to some very difficult questions about existence. And these are all things that the future Cult meme can do.
If cryptocurrency is a religion, it is a religion centered on currency, finance, and commercial revolution. The gods here are interchangeable, the narratives are flexible, the financial expectations are scalable, and cryptocurrency replaces "we believe in God" with "we believe in our coin".
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 unloading, and price increase has become the most effective marketing means.
However, the 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, so that they not only stay at the level of funny memes, but are closely combined with lifestyle products, forming a real cultural phenomenon.
