It seems that meme coins are entering a new wave of hype in this market cycle. At the end of last year, coins like MYRO, SILLY, and WIF initiated the first wave of Solana meme excitement; the second wave was sparked by the meme presale trend from BOME and SLERF in March this year.
Following this, criticism of VC-backed coins grew, and more meme coins began listing on centralized exchanges, gradually gaining wider acceptance. However, as the bull market transitioned into a bear, altcoins generally performed poorly.
Meanwhile, meme trading tools like Pump.Fun upgraded their infrastructure, further fueling the meme craze and leading to the outbreak of the third wave. After overcoming the so-called September curse, the crypto market welcomed a new trading frenzy, with a newly popular animal becoming the top meme. Recently, the return of abstract art has also generated a new wave of meme speculation.
Yesterday, on-chain detective ZachXBT revealed the wallet address of Murad Mahmudov, a well-known figure in the meme coin space. This disclosure sparked heated discussions in the crypto community—should an unaccused crypto user be subjected to such “doxxing”? ZachXBT argued that people should make wiser decisions about the tokens they purchase, rather than merely following KOLs with large followings.
Murad, a rising KOL in the meme coin space, became a sensation in the crypto community after delivering a speech about 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 following meme master Ansem, largely due to the effectiveness of his recommendations.
In the wallet address disclosed by ZachXBT, Murad holds three meme coins: SPX, APU, and MINI. On Twitter, he even created a list that included these three coins, along with established meme coins like MOG, POPCAT, and GIGA, all of which have recently experienced significant gains. A common feature among the meme coins Murad recommends is their cult-like aura.
A cult refers to a highly focused and passionate following culture, where fans exhibit extreme enthusiasm and loyalty towards a specific person, brand, idea, or work. This cultural phenomenon usually revolves around a niche but influential group that distinguishes itself from mainstream culture through shared beliefs, behaviors, or interests. In the crypto realm, understanding what a cult meme is and why one should revere cult memes may very well start with Murad himself.
Who is Murad Mahmudov?
If you Google Murad Mahmudov, aside from his recent viral speech on the “Super Cycle of Meme Coins,” you’ll find interviews and articles he wrote about Bitcoin before 2022—like “The Ultimate Argument for Bitcoin” and “The Past and Future of Bitcoin.” His titles clearly indicate he is a staunch Bitcoin maximalist.
Murad graduated from Princeton University and studied abroad in China for a year in 2013, where he met an American in Beijing’s expat community—an early employee of OK Coin. Through this friend, Murad learned about cryptocurrency and began his journey in the crypto world.
However, before 2016, Murad did not fully commit to the crypto space; he worked at traditional financial institutions like Goldman Sachs and Glencore. After resigning, Murad became a Bitcoin maximalist. Since 2017, he has done many things in the crypto field, writing on-chain analysis articles, trading, and participating in DeFi development. In 2018, Murad founded a community with tens of thousands of members and was once regarded as one of the leading Bitcoin analysts, with his portfolio growing fivefold in just seven months.
In 2019, Murad established a fund called Adaptive Capital, but it faced difficulties during the market crash on March 12, 2020, due to “insufficient infrastructure,” leading to its bankruptcy. After Adaptive’s collapse, 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. However, it wasn’t until this year that he identified the main theme for the new cycle—searching for true cult memes. In an interview, he stated, “In early 2024, I began attempting to understand meme coins from first principles.” By June, Murad started sharing his meme trading philosophy and targets with the community.
Murad’s appearance has also transformed from a short-haired, somewhat shy financial guy to a long-haired, bearded countercultural figure, consistent with the cult culture he promotes—definitely not mainstream.
The Cult List: How Does Murad Trade Meme Coins?
From June 25 to September 13, Murad filled out a list of cult memes he believes will explode in the upcoming super cycle.
With Murad’s rise to fame, this list has become the new trading bible. SPX, for example, saw its market cap soar from $20 million in July to over $600 million, and many people began to create their own lists in this format.
Why did Murad choose these meme coins? In an interview, he summarized his criteria for selecting meme coins:
- Focus on mid-cap coins valued between $5 million and $200 million;
- Prefer Solana and Ethereum, excluding Base, Ton, and Sui, as whales tend to park wealth in the first 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 swift.
- Projects should have at least six months of history;
Time cannot be faked; it represents real commitment. Assuming each of our lifespans is 80 years, time itself is a very serious investment resource.
Murad spent six to seven months using Twitter accounts and Telegram to join various meme coin Discord and Telegram groups to understand their atmosphere, culture, and what community members discuss. “Investing in memes is essentially investing in people,” he believes that cults will become the next big trend.
By studying on-chain data, market value, holder distribution, and decentralization, while avoiding leading derivative coins, political coins, celebrity coins, most animal coins, newly launched hot coins, and KOL-recommended coins, he identified the aforementioned cult memes.
Murad’s selection criteria can be summarized as choosing tokens that have existed for at least six months and have experienced at least two 70% drops.
Today’s meme coin market has divided into different tiers; large capital may opt for blue-chip meme coins with higher market caps expected to double, while others gamble on platforms like Pump.Fun, hoping to turn 2 SOL into 20 SOL.
Murad sees himself in between these two positions, focusing on discovering undervalued meme coins that meet most of his criteria. These projects may only lack one or two metrics but can easily improve and have extremely passionate community support, all while being relatively inexpensive. Murad refers to this strategy as the “Price and Faith Index,” believing 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, as the successes of Pump.Fun and Polymarket teach us that good crypto products do not necessarily need tokens. Murad believes the best tokens also don’t need products, citing examples like PEPE and WIF, with the counterexamples being serious meme coins with tangible projects.
However, lacking a product does not mean lacking utility. Murad argues that the best meme coins offer more functionality than almost all altcoins, providing fun, reducing loneliness, and fostering identity—achieving the goals that DAOs are supposed to fulfill, creating resonance, emotional connections, a sense of mission and meaning, entertainment, and happiness, even driving charity, storytelling, and legend-building.
In his TOKEN2049 speech, Murad pushed the narrative that meme coins are disrupting VC-backed coins and all altcoins to the extreme, arguing that the core of the meme coin super cycle lies in the market’s growing awareness that meme coins are stealing meme properties and speculative premiums from value coins. “Any crypto asset that does not allocate cash flow to your wallet or act as a value store is essentially a meme coin; 99.999% of altcoins are merely meme coins with more steps.”
DeFi investor RedSkull bluntly stated that future crypto projects will only be categorized as revenue-generating or non-revenue-generating. “If your project has no revenue, it belongs to the meme category, competing with other memes for speculative premiums; if it falls into the revenue-generating category, it competes mainly based on income, compared using standard price-to-earnings multiples.”
To gauge the changes brought about by this twenty-minute speech, on one hand, Murad’s recommended cult memes have indeed seen considerable gains, while on the other hand, it has engaged many who were previously uninterested in meme trading, even influencing some institutional VCs to consider including meme coins in their portfolios.
Murad has undoubtedly injected new vitality into the meme coin market, thanks to his mature and systematic understanding of memes and selection criteria, perhaps also due to his trading and analytical experience in the Bitcoin field over the years. However, why has Murad transitioned from Bitcoin maximalism to becoming the rallying figure of cult meme culture?
The Ultimate Vision of Meme Philosophy
To understand Murad’s meme philosophy, one might start with the origins of Bitcoin.
As a crypto OG who has been involved with Bitcoin since 2013, Murad has grown alongside Bitcoin and the culture of its community. The vast amount of blogs, books, and literature by Bitcoin maximalists has provided Murad with a solid foundation to understand and study meme coins.
Murad believes that the rise of meme coins is a byproduct of the cryptocurrency industry, which itself is a byproduct of the fiat currency system. Therefore, the existence and emergence of meme coins are driven by external forces, reminiscent of how Bitcoin was inspired by economic crises—where the monetary system is collapsing, yet Bitcoin and meme coins present completely opposite manifestations, akin to the two ends of a horseshoe.
On one hand, crises push people toward more robust alternatives, namely Bitcoin. On the other hand, the collapse of the fiat system also drives people towards speculative behavior, especially during times of inflation, when money loses its value, leading individuals to take risks.
This structural reasoning convinces Murad that meme coins will have a cultural effect as extreme as Bitcoin’s, almost resembling a new religious fervor, with their holders displaying this enthusiasm.
This is the fundamental reason why Murad champions cult memes. His recommended reading list supports this view, including works such as “The Future of Religion and the Religion of the Future,” “American Gods,” “The No Anti-Meme Department,” and “The Society of the Spectacle.” These books explore the evolution of belief and ideology, cultural and social dynamics, and information dissemination mechanisms, all of which help in understanding the essence of memes, their propagation, and their profound impact on individuals and society.
Some of Murad’s tweets, influenced by these readings, echo the succinct philosophical style of Naval, sharing insights related to memes in brief, impactful 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 life meaning. As fewer people have children, they will seek meaning elsewhere.”
- “Excess money supply + extreme loneliness + scarcity of meaning = funds flow to overly speculative assets. With ‘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, cult memes provide an additional sense of relative security, stemming from community cohesion and the personalities of the top 300 most active members, which permeates the overall culture and atmosphere of the meme.”
In Murad’s view, a meme is not just a sector but a culture and a property. More abstractly, memes relate to meaning, while cult memes carry an even grander imagination.
Becoming the Next Religion
To answer more directly what a cult meme is, Murad describes it as a group of people coming together in extreme fervor for some reason. “The ultimate dream of meme coins is to become the next religion; thus, 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 different things to its audience: for some, it offers community; for others, it provides guidance; for some, it offers an object of faith and a sense of belonging, transcending the self. Of course, religion also provides lifestyle advice and answers to some very difficult questions about existence. All these are potentials for future cult memes.
If we consider cryptocurrency a religion, it is one centered around monetary, financial, and commercial revolution. The deity here is replaceable, the narrative is flexible, and financial expectations are scalable; cryptocurrency replaces “We believe in God” with “We believe in our coin.”
Matti from Zee Prime Capital argues that meme coins themselves are merely a social game of ups and downs, akin to a new form of lottery, vaguely related to the zeitgeist. However, meme coins have a broader scope; the current form of meme coins remains very primitive because they do not focus on sustainability, instead chasing quick gains and selling off, with price increases becoming the most effective marketing tool.
Yet, future meme coins can transcend this; price increases will merely be a means to achieve greater goals—meme coins are not just cultural carriers but also bear distribution functions, integrating closely with lifestyle products and forming a genuine cultural phenomenon, rather than remaining at the humorous meme level.
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