The latest interview with the new "meme traffic king" Murad: How to find the thousand-fold gold dog in the meme super cycle? | In-depth dialogue

Host: Fraokh; Tyler; Mando; @FOMOHOUR
Guest: Murad Mahmudov
Original translation: zhouzhou, BlockBeats

Editor's note: In this article, Murad shares how he entered the cryptocurrency field and gradually formed his own Meme investment thesis. He discussed how to choose Meme, why he thinks Meme launched in 2023 will be better, and how he tested and verified his investment strategy. Murad emphasized the connection between NFT and Meme, and believes that Meme will have a huge upside in 2025, and put forward the view that belief is more important than short-term trading.

TL;DR:

Murad's Crypto Journey:I came into contact with crypto when I was studying in China. I think 2025 will be a year of great opportunities in the crypto field, especially Meme. Meme is a counterattack against VC to some extent.

Meme Investment Strategy:I realized the big explosion of Meme, but it takes at least seven to eight months to build a belief, so I think Meme in 2023 will be the biggest winner.

Explore the market trend of Meme:Look for the leader in the Meme category, which has a long time, a community, and a suitable market value, which will have a better risk-return ratio. Meme is still in its early stages, and anti-VC sentiment will be higher next year.

What do you think of the current development of the NFT field:Meme and NFT are the same thing, but the scale of Meme will be larger, and the NFT projects that perform well in the future will definitely be those linked to Meme.

The following is the original text of the conversation (there are three hosts in the podcast. For ease of reading and understanding, the hosts are collectively referred to, and the original content has been deleted and reorganized):

Murad:

This is not a market for traders, but a market for believers. We no longer focus on technical analysis, range trading or market timing. Regardless of market value, the top Memes of AC and Krypton may increase by 30 times, 50 times, or even 100 times. All this seems like a phantom and elusive.

Host: Our co-host Tyler really liked your lists and did a special index analysis for them. We are now in the midst of the illusion of a FOMO moment, so I would like to ask you a few questions. I personally would like to know more about your background and how you got to where you are today.

Murad's Journey into Cryptocurrency

Murad : I am originally from Azerbaijan and later went to the United States to attend university. During my time there, I spent a year as an exchange student in China, around the end of 2013 to the beginning of 2014, which was the famous 2013 Bitcoin bubble, four years before the 2017 bubble. I was lucky enough to have several foreign friends who were involved in the early Bitcoin ecosystem, which was my first exposure to Bitcoin.

By 2016, when Bitcoin and Ethereum became the focus again, I had already started to pay close attention and realized that I needed to take cryptocurrencies more seriously. Before that, I worked in the field of commodity trading and logistics. Since 2017, I have done a lot of things in the crypto field, writing on-chain analysis articles, trading and investing, and participating in the construction of decentralized finance. In 2019, I founded a fund, but unfortunately it did not perform well. Now I am building a decentralized financial trading protocol, a social financial trading protocol called SDFX. In addition, I have also participated in a lot of Meme investments and transactions, and studied Meme from the perspective of on-chain and data analysis.

Host: How do you feel as a "protagonist" now? Your interview with Token 2049 caused quite a stir. How do you feel now?

Murad: I try to face this with grace and humility. In fact, I think we still have 8 to 14 months of meme craze to go through. Therefore, I say to my friends who are involved in meme, we need to try to stay calm and patient, and not celebrate or be impulsive before 2026. I think 2025 will be a huge opportunity year in the crypto field, especially meme, and we need to be prepared to seize this wave of opportunities.

Host: You shared your core ideas in your speech on Token 2049. How did you come up with this idea? How long have you been preparing for it? Where did this idea come from?

Murad: Besides cryptocurrencies themselves, the outside world is changing. Inflationary pressures are still ongoing and the global money supply is increasing. Those who are familiar with the Bitcoin maximalist literature from 2015, 2016 know that this has had an impact on people's mental health, financial markets, the nature of assets, how they are traded, and even on a chemical level to an emotional level. I think all of these factors are also affecting the crypto market in microcosm, which is why every four years the mainstream altcoin narrative and the core altcoin themes are getting more and more crazy.

So it's not surprising that memes are leading the market now, because we've seen this trend since around 2013 when altcoins first appeared. At that time, altcoins were all about using blockchain to do this and using decentralization to do that. Now that it's almost ten years later, I think people have begun to accept the hard truth that the actual use cases of blockchain technology are much less than people have been hyping.

But some of the use cases we have identified, such as store of value, are exactly what Bitcoin is good at; there is also payment, which is mainly a combination of stablecoins and payment rails; and finally, all forms of speculation, all different kinds of speculation, whether it is at the application level or the asset level, you can think of them as the same thing, you can even think of these tokens as tables in a casino. And the reality is that memes now reveal a dark truth, which is that all the altcoins that have ever existed have always been memes, they are just wearing the coat of Silicon Valley and branding Silicon Valley.

For example, we hired these distributed system engineers, we have this Github, we have that Github. But at the end of the day, the retail investors who are really driving the price surge and exponential growth don't care about technology, they care about making money and having fun. That's the core problem, everything is essentially a performance art, full of manipulation and marketing, selling $50 billion worth of tokens to people.

So, Meme is a kind of counterattack against this phenomenon to some extent, a populist counterattack from the bottom. Because in 2017, poor people could still get rich by buying ICOs, at least the initial trading price of ICOs was low at that time, and you could gradually build communities to make the middle class upper middle class, or make the poor rich. This process is organic, even like Chainlink and ByteDance tokens, their initial trading prices were only about 20 million and 15 million US dollars, which were relatively affordable.

Frankly speaking, VC institutions have now privatized all the gains in this field. In private rounds, once a project has liquidity, its valuation has reached 15 billion US dollars. Obviously, you can't build a real community in this situation. So people realize that if it's not a problem with the software, then the token itself is the core value, and the community built around it.

I believe that young people in their twenties and early thirties have realized that we don't actually need to buy VC's tokens. They don't actually have a monopoly on the creation of tokens, and the meme wave is essentially a powerful counterattack. It started as a revenge against VC, but my bolder view is that this trend will evolve into a much larger and more important phenomenon.

Meme Investment Strategy

Moderator: We basically agree on this, and I think most people in the cryptocurrency field see it this way. Like when I entered the industry in 2021, most people in the crypto circle were talking about buying altcoins that could go up 100 times, but they didn't realize that token economics means you are actually fighting against an extremely powerful trend, so we all agree that the dominance of memes will become higher and higher.

As you said, the main use of cryptocurrency now is payment, and Bitcoin maximalists will compare it to "digital gold." Then you have speculation, and memes are a big part of internet culture. So how does the fun part start? How do you choose these memes? Once you decide that memes are your focus, how do you get to the next stage?

Murad :  I quickly realized that a platform like Pump Fun would eventually lead to a massive amount of memes, almost every single thing would have its own meme. So in my mind, I felt it was worth doing a thought experiment, let's assume that in the future there will be a meme for every single thing, like every color, every country, every meme, every animal, every picture, even billions of memes. On the supply side, these memes are endless; on the demand side, let's say we give everyone in the world $2,000, they have to invest in two or three memes. So combining these two, you start to simulate in your mind and ask yourself, in this environment, which memes will win?

You'll find that probably 70% of people are just gambling away their money, which you can already see on platforms like Pump Fun. So what's going to be the other 30%? What will survive and be sustainable? Ultimately it all comes down to the community and the people who are involved. My point is that what you really need is something that is passionate, even to the point of being a kind of "fanatic", or even a movement, or dare I say a mini modern religion. These things will eventually become part of people's identity because they touch people's hearts. People will become very engaged, and it's all about emotional resonance and inspiration.

So to identify which memes will become giants in the future, you need to ask yourself: Which memes are more inspiring? The memes that inspire more people will reach a higher market value in 2025. Then we can dig into some quantitative things, such as how to measure inspiration? How to measure emotion?

Moderator: I agree with you. I actually created a meme myself and it quickly became a religion. These things can develop quite smoothly. But I want to go back to the list you mentioned earlier. When I first saw this list, it was actually a little confusing because you seemed to have chosen the coins with the least number of holders, which is not the same as traditionally done by other memes.

Also, this is obviously a long-term valuation list, and seeing it will inspire some reactions. But I think you seem to have discovered something that others have not noticed, such as that religious factor, those diamond hands, they will hold these coins for as long as possible, especially those relatively slightly older coins that we may pay more attention to. I looked through the list and most of the coins are not recently launched, they were launched in the last year or have been building communities for more than six months, and now it seems that these coins are showing signs of rising.

Murad : I have some bias towards the memes in 2023 or even early 2024. I think time is a very important factor. It takes at least seven to eight months to build a belief, which is why I think the memes in 2023 will be the biggest winners. Because you need time for sellers to exit and for the supply of coins to be concentrated in the hands of those who believe in extremely high market caps. You saw this with MOG in 2023, and I believe you are seeing similar things with Harry Potter Bomb now, especially in the range of price fluctuations. SPX has also performed similarly over the past year, and Giga will do the same in the first four to five months of 2024.

To build faith, it takes time for this concept to resonate and gradually penetrate in society, and it also takes time for the supply to be concentrated in the hands of true believers, rather than those who will sell for 3x or 4x returns. When the supply is in the hands of true believers, the supply is basically solved, and the next step is to solve the demand problem. So every time there is an influx of funds, the price of the coin will rise parabolically, because these believers will not move their coins unless their goals are reached - such as a market value of $100 billion.

It doesn't matter whether you believe in this goal or not, what matters is the belief of the holders, because they are the ones who make the decision. So when people talk about faith, it essentially means faith in the final valuation, faith in friends, faith in the mission, and faith in this Meme movement. These are all things you need to delve into.

Moderator: So is this list static or dynamic? Do you plan to add or remove some of these coins? I know a lot of people are concerned about this question because whether this is your original intention or not, a lot of people now think of this list as the Murad list.

Murad : I have a lot of responsibility now, and I don't want to be the kind of person who randomly pushes coins. I spent 6 to 7 months, almost like in the trenches, using some small Twitter and Telegram accounts, deep into various Discord and Telegram groups, to understand the atmosphere, the culture, and the people. So all my choices are very deliberate and very convicted.

I'm not sure if I will make any changes to this list, but I am very confident in this list at the moment. One thing I realized, and it has paid off greatly, is that this is not a trader's market, but a believer's market. Believers are like investors on steroids, metaphorically speaking. Believers understand, forget technical analysis, forget range trading, forget timing, forget rotations. If you think this cycle will be like the last three, we may actually be in year four. And in year four, the bull market zealots will outperform everyone.

Even the most sophisticated quants in the world can’t compete with those diamond holders. So I firmly believe that you should find a group of believers that resonates strongly with you personally, and that resonates with millions of people around the world, and that’s the winning formula. You should buy and hold for the long term. As I mentioned before, I think we have 8 to 12 months left, maybe more. I believe the top 10 or 15 memes are going to have extreme parabolic rises. The core of my logic is trying to find the leaders in each category, and there are different categories of memes now, and these categories will continue to increase.

Exploring the Market Trends of Meme

Moderator: What I'm trying to observe in the meme space, especially digging into some of the niches, can you talk about this in detail?

Murad:  Obviously, you have Dogecoin, which I think is the leader now. And then there are cat coins, which I think Pop Cat is the leader. Then you have the so-called cultural coins, such as MOG, which I think is the leader. And then there is SPX, which I classify as a sports coin, which is a completely new category. And then there is Giga, which is a combination of lifestyle, culture and masculinity. In addition, there are some other smaller categories.

My vision is that category leaders almost always have a better risk-reward ratio. Because whether it's a big whale coming in or the traffic itself getting involved, they will always choose the category leaders, so it's better to hold the leaders in each category. And those who chase the "sub-leaders" or the smaller versions of the leaders will always lose because it will eventually become a player-to-player competition.

Next, I think this is one of the most important concepts in Meme, the so-called "critical mass". Let's say the critical mass is $200 million. In simple terms, if a coin can reach a market value of 200 million, it is likely to continue to rise to 1 billion, or even 1.2 billion, 1.5 billion, at least there is a high probability that it will develop in this way. But if it doesn't reach 200 million, it may fall and slowly wither. So even though there are thousands of Memes, it doesn't matter because in the end you should only focus on the top 40 to 50 coins.

Host: The earliest meme investment logic is to find a group of believers, right? But I think what you really did is point out that they have to reach a certain "age" before they have enough maturity to make people feel this belief while making money. For example, some coins like MOG have risen by millions, but it takes a long time to really transition to the right holders, and even if it survives, you have to find something with religious "belief".

You also have to find these niche markets, which is similar to the old altcoins. In the past we had different categories of altcoins, and now memes seem to be copying this model, but doing it better. Why buy game coins, DeFi coins, or other altcoin categories? They are often sold off by venture capital (VC) for months or even years. And I think these memes have the potential to surpass them and even be stronger than those with the largest market capitalization.

Murad: The "huge rotation" narrative from tech stocks to memes, I think it's still in its early stages, and I think it will continue to happen next year. And anti-VC sentiment has not yet peaked, I think this sentiment will only get stronger, especially against those VC-backed coins. You also need to understand that there will be about $150 billion of unlocked funds in the next four years that will pour into some altcoin projects, which is like inflation. These investors will receive a lot of tokens and start to cash out their profits.

These VC investors are not the true believers you are looking for. On the contrary, the true fanatical believers in a meme community will far exceed all technical factors in price movements. At the end of the day, the essence of financial markets is human behavior and human beliefs. If you go deep into it and participate in various group chats of these VC-backed tech coins and memes, you will find that the supporters of memes are a thousand times more passionate than those of tech coins. And that's the passion you're really betting on, that's the passion you're looking for. Once you find that passion, the money will pour in, potentially millions, even billions of dollars.

Moderator: How did you test and validate your thesis, you said you used smurfs, went into Telegram and Discord groups, and talked to people. I'm wondering, in that process, were there coins that you thought would make your list that didn't make it because you dug deeper and found that they didn't fit? Was there anything that surprised you in that testing and validation process?

Murad : I developed a series of filters that then filtered out about 20 to 25 of what I call "faith communities." So what were those filters? First of all, I didn't want to buy the biggest memes because many of them were already on big platforms like ByteDance, and they had already experienced important catalytic events. I also didn't want to get involved in short-term speculative projects of the "Pump Fund" type.

Gradually, it became clear to me that what really matters in the end is the relationship between price and attention, price and "religiosity," or price and passion. I think the biggest value right now is in the mid-cap believer community, and I'm looking at coins with a market cap between $5 million and $200 million. I think that's a good range, and that's what I broadly consider to be mid-cap coins.

The second point is that I'm leaning more towards Solana and Ethereum than other chains. I know there are projects on chains like Base, Ton, Sui, etc., but I think the first big driver of these market caps will ultimately come from whales who hold altcoins. But where do altcoin whales park their wealth? Right now the answer is Ethereum and Solana.

The ETH and SOL tokens they hold represent $70 billion and $300 billion in wealth, respectively, and there are a lot of stablecoins there as well. So these chains are like large bank accounts. Once they really understand that Meme is going to dominate the altcoin market this cycle and next year, the money will flow very quickly. This flow will drive us to see market caps of $100 million, $200 million, or even $3 billion. So, I focus on Ethereum and Solana.

Another important point is that when I screen projects, I mainly look at those that are at least six months old. Because in my opinion, building a belief or community building is like an airplane taking off. Before taking off, the airplane needs to accelerate first. In this example, acceleration is time, and nothing can replace time.

Prices can be manipulated artificially, short-term trading volumes can be artificially created, and even lists on centralized exchanges can be artificially arranged, but in the end, time cannot be faked. Assuming that each of us has a lifespan of 80 years, time itself is a very serious resource investment. If I see that the market value of a Meme has been consolidating below $20 million for a year, it has not exploded, but it has not died, that is a signal worth paying attention to.

I know there is a core group of holders who are constantly absorbing coins from non-believers through regular investment, which is exactly what I want to find. Personally, as you may have noticed, I have found the greatest success in projects with a market value of between 10 million and 30 million, or 10 million and 40 million US dollars. I think this is a sweet spot that can develop an early belief group without being too expensive. In the past four or five months, I have personally found the most value in this market value range.

In addition, I hope that the meme itself is unique. I prefer two types of things: one is "real" memes like Giga and APU, which have been popular on platforms such as TikTok and Instagram since 2016; the other is those new projects with some kind of movement or religious atmosphere. Because for real memes, people are already familiar with them; and for those memes with movement nature, they can inspire higher-level inspiration, which are more "quantitative" things.

As you may have noticed, I really like projects that are as truly decentralized as possible. I want the supply of tokens to be decentralized in general and also decentralized in terms of whale holdings. There are projects where the supply is almost controlled by a few large holders, six people hold 75% of the supply, and we all know these cases.

Moderator: You have to protect people from these "kebab coins".

Murad :  If you are a big whale now, or you are a VC or institution considering getting involved in memes, please hire an on-chain analyst, or an on-chain quantitative analyst, and have them look at not only the overall indicators, but also carefully analyze what happened in the earliest blocks, especially the earliest 100 blocks, and the most important thing is the religiousness and inspiration. As I said before, I also want the whale holding group to be decentralized. So I look at how many people hold less than 0.3% but more than 0.1% of the tokens, and then break that data down into different groups and structures of holders that I hope are balanced and appear organic. If you plot all of this information into a giant matrix, you can see which coins are legitimate and which are not.

As I said before, you are investing in people, so if you have the opportunity, you need to figure out who the leaders are, if there are even any leaders, what the decision-making process is, who are the biggest whales, who is discussing the project on Twitter, and who is not discussing the project on Twitter.

In addition to all the quantitative factors I mentioned, you also need to feel the atmosphere and culture. Are these people sincere? Or is it just another speculative group that is only hot in the short term and will quickly sell your coins? Obviously, you want to look for people who have long-term thinking, at least their thinking is calculated in quarters, preferably in years, rather than those who just want to make 10 times quickly and sell next week. So ultimately you need to understand these people, understand their culture, and understand their memes. In addition to all these mathematical indicators, this is the basis for you to form a judgment.

What do you think about the development of the NFT field now?

Moderator: You recently posted about NFTs, right? You reposted that famous Murad list, including the NFT section. I really like to see Bitcoin Puppet in it, and of course my Punk. What do you think about the development of the NFT field now? Many people say that the meme of this cycle is like the NFT of the previous cycle. Do you agree with this?

Murad :  From a technical point of view, memes and NFTs are the same thing, but I believe that memes will be 50 times larger. The simple reason is that even in a successful NFT project, if you really calculate the numbers, you will find that there are about 3,000 to 4,000 people promoting 10,000 illiquid JPEGs. The situation with memes is much more efficient and more optimized for both parties.

Instead of having 3,000 people promoting 10,000 different illiquid JPEGs, it is better to have 500,000 people promoting the same coin. From a liquidity perspective, you can see that this approach is much more economical and powerful, which is why you see more crazy parabolic rises in top memes than BAYC or CryptoPunks. Memes and NFTs are very similar in nature, but the financial instruments that express Memes are better and more efficient, which is why Meme's market cap will be 30, 50, or even 100 times higher than the peaks of BAYC and CryptoPunks.

In my opinion, the NFT projects that will perform well in this cycle will be those that are linked to Memes. Ideally, it would be better to have Memes first and then launch NFT collections, so that the development is more natural and Memes will be given priority.

Here’s why, and why I’m so bullish on Sprout Gram, Lens Project Eon, Ricardo, and the upcoming ARPU NFT. I think all four of these memes will perform extremely well, and their market caps will be in the billions. This means their communities will become very wealthy, and in the digital realm, this will become a huge social symbol—you are a member of these communities.

In addition, the “core” members of these memes will own one or more of these NFTs, and I think Project Eon, Sproto, Gramons, and Ricardo will become the Patek Philippe, Vacheron Constantin, and Audemars Piguet of the modern Meme movement, and be respected. I even think their floor price may reach 50 ETH, and if the Meme craze really goes crazy, they may rise to a floor price of 100 ETH.

I know this sounds crazy now, but if you do the math of illiquid assets - and I know you saw this in late 2021 - their prices can move very quickly. And the human brain is linear, and the human brain is very bad at understanding parabolic growth and exponential changes. I think these NFTs, especially my favorites, like Programming, Project Eon, and Ritardia, I mentioned, have huge potential in the future.

Moderator: It's true that things often develop crazier than anyone expects. Like Bored Apes went to a floor price of $400,000 to $500,000 last cycle. Murat, I love that you included Punks in your list, I think it makes the whole discussion more authoritative, and I agree with your meme point.

How do you plan to exit? Now you have a kind of "belief group" status, and everyone is paying attention to your gameplay, such as the "MURAD Index". So once you start selling, will this all fall apart? Are you worried about that? Have you thought about what it will be like in 8 to 12 or even 14 months? Will it be difficult to exit then?

Murad : I would definitely sell some of it in late 2025 or early 2026. For both SPX and Giga, I would definitely hold them across multiple cycles because I think they will outlast one cycle and continue to strengthen.

But the thing is, by mid-2025, there will definitely be a meme valuation framework. People will start using Excel spreadsheets, quantitative analysis, combined with all social media data to determine what is overvalued and what is undervalued. Just like altcoins, there will be periods of undervaluation and overvaluation, and it depends on how you formulate your own entry and exit strategies.

I recommend that everyone use the DCA method for both entry and exit, which will be much better, because it is difficult to accurately grasp the market timing. Maybe you are very good and can grasp a specific month or quarter. But in general, DCA in and out is the most conservative way. In the long run, it performs much better than all-in and all-out at once.

Host: Mando, you made a lot of money on the Bored Apes project. What do you think of Murad's NFT theory?

Host Mando: I find it interesting because I actually think NFTs are naturally more suitable for memeization in terms of community building, and are better than memes. I find that in the Telegram or Discord groups of NFTs, the focus of discussion is often not just on price, but people associate it more with personal identity.

In the discussion of Meme, price is often the main topic, and although there is a Meme conference, there is no NFT conference yet. Maybe this situation will change, and this element of "belief" you mentioned may get us there. But I do agree that in terms of market value, Meme may go further than the top NFT projects. Because the nature of Meme determines that it can have tens of thousands of holders, while an NFT project has a maximum of 10,000 holders. However, the real core community is more like "Seal Team Six", while the community of Meme is more decentralized.

Murad :  The success of NFT projects can sometimes become its own enemy, because the floor price becomes high and low-income people cannot participate. Memes are different, and you can participate at any price point.

Host: How do you respond to those who question your views? We discussed at the beginning of the show that many people think you are a "protagonist", but some people think that everything you say is delusional, unfeasible, etc. How do you deal with it?

Murad :  I am very happy for people to think I am delusional because it means we are still in the early stages. If everyone agrees with me, there will be no economic opportunity here. I welcome all criticism, doubts, and even the label of "delusional" because it only tells me that we still have more room to rise.

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