Author: shushu, BlockBeats

Meme coins seem to have ushered in a new wave of speculation in this cycle.

At the end of last year, meme coins represented by MYRO, SILLY, and WIF sparked the first wave of Solana meme fever in this cycle; the second wave of meme fever originated from the meme presale craze initiated by BOME and SLERF in March this year. Since then, the outcry against VC coins has gradually spread, and more and more meme coins have been listed on CEX, gradually gaining greater acceptance. As the bull market turned bearish, altcoins generally performed poorly, while meme trading tools led by Pump.Fun further promoted the meme craze through infrastructure upgrades, triggering the outbreak of the third wave of meme trends. After passing the so-called September curse, the crypto market welcomed a new wave of trading enthusiasm, with newly popular animals becoming the top meme stars. Recently, however, the abstract faction has returned to the market, bringing a new wave of meme speculation potential.

The market capitalization changes of the meme coin sector over the past year, source: CoinMarketCap

Yesterday, on-chain detective ZachXBT publicly revealed the wallet address of the call master Murad Mahmudov, which quickly sparked heated discussions in the crypto community—should a non-accused crypto user be subjected to such "doxxing"? ZachXBT's reasoning is that people should make wiser decisions about the tokens they purchase, rather than just following KOLs with large fan bases.

Murad, a recently popular KOL in the meme coin space, became a sensation in the crypto circle with his speech on the super cycle of meme coins at the TOKEN2049 conference. He boldly predicted that Bitcoin would reach $10 million and is now regarded as the next top influencer after meme master Ansem, largely due to the effectiveness of Murad's calls.

In the address disclosed by ZachXBT, Murad holds three meme coins: SPX, APU, and MINI. On Twitter, Murad also created a list that includes these three meme coins, along with established meme coins like MOG, POPCAT, and GIGA, all of which have recently seen considerable gains. A common characteristic of the meme coins that Murad promotes is that they all possess some cult-like qualities.

Cult refers to a highly focused and fervent following culture, where fans exhibit extreme enthusiasm and loyalty towards a specific entity, such as a person, brand, idea, or work. This cultural phenomenon typically revolves around a niche but influential group, distinguishing itself from mainstream culture through shared beliefs, behaviors, or interests. In the crypto realm, what constitutes a cult meme, and why should cult memes be revered? Perhaps it all starts with Murad.

From Bitcoin Supremacy to Cult Meme Patriarch, Who is Murad?

If you Google Murad Mahmudov, aside from the recent hot topic of his speech on the "Super Cycle of Meme Coins," you will find interviews and articles about Bitcoin from before 2022—such as "The Ultimate Argument for Bitcoin" and "The Past and Future of Bitcoin." From the titles, it is clear that he is a staunch Bitcoin supremacist.

Murad graduated from Princeton University and studied abroad in China for a year in 2013, where he met an American in Beijing's expat circle—an employee of OK Coin. Through this friend, Murad learned about cryptocurrency and began his crypto journey.

However, before 2016, Murad did not fully immerse himself in the crypto field, working instead at traditional financial institutions like Goldman Sachs and Glencore. After resigning, Murad became a Bitcoin Maxi. Since 2017, Murad has done many things in the crypto space, writing on-chain analysis articles, engaging in trading and investment, and participating in DeFi development. In 2018, Murad established a community with tens of thousands of members and was once considered one of the leading Bitcoin analysts; within just seven months, his investment portfolio grew fivefold.

In 2019, Murad founded a fund called Adaptive Capital, but the good times did not last long. During the crash on March 12, 2020, the fund was unable to respond appropriately to the sell-off due to "insufficient infrastructure," leading to its 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, rekindling his passion for crypto. However, it wasn't until this year that Murad found the main task of the new cycle: to seek out genuine cult memes. In an interview, he stated, "It wasn't until early 2024 that I began to try to understand meme coins from a first-principles perspective." In June, Murad began sharing his meme trading philosophy and targets within the community.

Murad's appearance has also transformed from a short-haired, somewhat shy finance guy to a long-haired, bearded countercultural figure, consistent with the cult culture he promotes, which is at least not mainstream.

Cult List: How Does Murad Trade Meme Coins?

From June 25 to September 13, Murad gradually filled out a list of cult memes that he believes will explode in the upcoming meme super cycle.

As Murad gained popularity, this list became a new trading bible, with SPX leading the way, its market cap rising from $20 million in July to over $600 million. Many people have mimicked this format to create their own lists.

Why did Murad choose these meme coins? In an interview, he summarized his meme coin selection criteria:

· Focus on mid-cap coins with market caps between $5 million and $200 million;

· Prefer Solana and Ethereum, excluding Base, Ton, and Sui, because whales will park their wealth in the former two;

"These chains are like large bank accounts. Once they truly understand that meme coins will dominate the altcoin market in this cycle, the flow of funds will be very rapid."

· Projects must have 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 a Twitter alt account and Telegram to join various meme coin Discord and Telegram groups to understand the atmosphere, culture, and what group members were discussing. "Investing in memes is essentially investing in people," Murad believes that cults will become the next big trend. By studying on-chain data, market value, holder distribution, decentralization levels, and avoiding leading derivative coins, political coins, celebrity coins, most animal coins, newly launched hot coins, and KOL call coins, he filtered out the aforementioned cult memes.

In simple terms, Murad's selection criteria involve picking tokens that have existed for at least six months and have experienced at least two 70% drops.

The current meme coin market has already been divided into different tiers. Large amounts of capital may choose to buy blue-chip meme coins with high market caps that are likely to double, while on the other hand, some investors gamble on platforms like Pump.Fun, hoping to turn 2 SOL into 20 SOL.

Murad believes he is positioned in between, focusing on finding undervalued meme coins that meet most of his selection criteria. These projects may only lack one or two indicators but can be easily improved, while also having extremely passionate community support and relatively low prices. Murad refers to this strategy as the "Price and Faith Index," believing that investors should look for projects with high faith but still low prices.

The Super Cycle of Meme Coins

The "Price and Faith Index" typically only applies to meme coins because the success of Pump.Fun and Polymarket teaches us that good crypto products do not necessarily need tokens. Murad believes that the best tokens do not need products, such as PEPE and WIF, while the opposite may be true for those meme coins that are genuinely doing something.

However, the absence of a product does not mean a lack of utility. Murad believes that the best meme coins offer more functionality than almost all altcoins. They provide fun, reduce feelings of loneliness, and offer identity recognition—achieving the goals that DAOs are supposed to fulfill, bringing resonance, emotional connections, a sense of mission and meaning, entertainment, and happiness, and even promoting charity, storytelling, and legend-building.

Murad's speech scene, source: YouTube

In his speech at TOKEN2049, Murad pushed the argument that meme coins are subverting VC coins and all altcoins to the extreme. The core of his argument about the meme coin super cycle 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 allocate cash flow to your wallet or act as a store of value is essentially a meme coin; 99.999% of altcoins are just meme coins with 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 belongs to the meme category, competing with other memes for speculative premiums; if it falls into the revenue-generating category, then it primarily competes based on income, compared according to standard price-to-earnings multiples."

To measure the impact of this twenty-minute speech, on one hand, the Cult memes that Murad "called out" have indeed seen significant increases, and on the other hand, it has engaged many who were previously not enthusiastic about meme trading, even influencing some institutional VCs to consider adding meme coins to their portfolios.

This demonstrates that Murad has injected new vitality into the meme coin market, thanks to his mature and systematic understanding and selection criteria for memes, which may also be attributed to his trading and analytical experience in the Bitcoin space over the past few years. However, why has Murad transitioned from Bitcoin supremacy to now fervently advocating for Cult memes?

The Ultimate Vision of Meme Philosophy

To understand Murad's meme philosophy, one might need to start from the origins of Bitcoin.

As a crypto OG who has been involved with Bitcoin since 2013, Murad has grown alongside Bitcoin and the Bitcoin community culture. A wealth of blogs, books, and literature from Bitcoin maximalists has provided Murad with a perfect foundation for understanding and researching 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. Therefore, the existence and emergence of meme coins are driven by external forces, similar to how Bitcoin was inspired by economic crises—while the monetary system is collapsing, the manifestations of Bitcoin and meme coins are entirely opposite, like the two ends of a horseshoe.

On one hand, crises drive people towards more robust alternatives, namely Bitcoin. On the other hand, the collapse of the fiat currency system also pushes people towards speculative behavior, especially evident during periods of inflation when people's money cannot retain value, leading them to take risks and gamble.

This structural reason leads Murad to believe that meme coins will have an extreme cultural effect, akin to a new religious fervor, and their holders will exhibit this fervor.

This is the fundamental reason Murad advocates for Cult memes. The reading list he provides supports this, as his research materials on memes include "The Future of Religion and the Future of Religions," "American Gods," "The No Anti-Meme Department," and "The Society of the Spectacle." These books explore the evolution of beliefs and ideologies, cultural and social dynamics, and information dissemination mechanisms, all of which help in understanding the essence of memes, their propagation mechanisms, and their profound impact on individuals and society.

Murad's recommended reading list for meme research, source: X

Some of Murad's tweets have also taken on a style reminiscent of Naval after being influenced by these books, sharing concise sentences that convey philosophies related to memes.

"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 market cap of Cult memes, because children give people meaning in life. If fewer people have children, they will seek meaning elsewhere."

"Excess money supply + excessive loneliness + scarcity of meaning = funds flowing into speculative assets. Due to 'more money' and 'more loneliness' in the system than four years ago, assets need to be more speculative than those in 2021."

"Compared to ordinary memes, the additional service provided by Cult memes is a higher sense of relative 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. More abstractly, memes are about meaning, while Cult memes have grander imaginations.

Becoming the Next Religion

To answer what Cult memes are more directly, Murad describes them as a group of people who gather together with extreme fervor for a certain 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 fervor is a characteristic of religion. Essentially, religion can provide various things to its audience; for some, it offers community, for others, it provides guidance, and for some, it offers an object of faith and a sense of belonging, transcending the self. Of course, religion also provides lifestyle advice, answers to some very difficult questions about existence, and so on. And these are things that future Cult memes can achieve.

If cryptocurrency is a religion, it is a religion centered around currency, finance, and commercial revolution. The deities here are interchangeable, the narratives are flexible, and the financial expectations are scalable, with cryptocurrency replacing "We believe in God" with "We believe in our coin."

Matti from Zee Prime Capital believes that meme coins themselves are merely a social game of ups and downs, a new form of lottery vaguely associated with grasping the spirit of the times. However, meme coins have broader potential; the current forms of meme coins are still very primitive, as they do not focus on sustainability but rather pursue quick pumps and dumps, with price increases becoming the most effective marketing strategy.

However, future meme coins can transcend this; price increases are merely a means to achieve greater goals—meme coins are not just carriers of culture but also embody distribution functions, allowing them to integrate closely with lifestyle products, forming a true cultural phenomenon rather than remaining at the level of humorous memes.

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