How Bitcoin Prepared Us for the Memecoin Era | Murad Mahmudov

Transcript

however there are many things uh which Bitcoin and meme coins share at least the best ones and that is their extreme cess right their extreme almost like a Neo religious type Zeal that their holders embody and from that particular perspective there are a ton of similarities hey everyone this episode is brought to you by namada the shielded asset Hub rewarding you to protect the multichain so not only can you protect your own data across any asset and any chain but you also get shielding rewards for strengthening data privacy protections for everyone so you can check them out at n.net and follow the domain net launch stick around you're

going to be hearing all about them later in the program hey everyone this episode is brought to you by Supra the vertically integrated L1 for super daps uh they have a very cool new product coming out called Supra container so head over to supra.com that's supra.com containers so if you're building on an L1 and it feels a little bit crowded or the complexity of L2 and l3s are getting you down just head over to Supra they'll get you sorted thank me later all right everyone welcome back to another episode of bell curve before we jump in quick disclaimer the views expressed by my co-host today are their personal views and they do not represent the views of any organization with which the co-hosts are associated with uh nothing in the episode is construed or relied upon as

Financial technical tax legal or other advice you know the deal now let's jump into the episode hey everyone welcome back to another episode of b c today I'm joined by Morad mamadov Morad welcome thanks for having me Michael yeah I'm uh I'm really excited to talk to you man I um I know most of these most of the time today you uh you're very focused on Meme coins and that's probably how most people on crypto Twitter know you but we were actually just catching up a little bit I actually we we bumped into each other I'll be it very briefly uh back in 2018 or 2019 actually you recorded an episode uh one of the very first episode of Anthony Pompano's podcast uh on bitcoin um and

so I always knew you as this very Bitcoin Centric Bitcoin first kind of guy and I we'll link it in the show notes but I still think that's one of the best episodes on bitcoin that's ever been recorded uh it was a really strong episode so I want to get into your whole sort of transition like how you found Bitcoin how that ultimately LED you to uh being very enthusiastic about meme coins but first for the audience could you just give everyone a little bit of a background on you who you are as a person and the like take us through how you found Bitcoin yeah for sure so my name is Morad I'm originally from aeran um went to school in the United States um studied finance and Chinese um did a year abroad in China and that was 2013 so like that was uh

like during that bubble um a few years before the 2017 bubble and I was really lucky to be kind of in the right place at the right time time um met employee number five at what was then called okcoin it it's now okx and that that was an american guy so uh we were kind of like in Foreigner circles in Beijing and I was just kind of Lucky to kind of be exposed to the ecosystem early on um only bought a couple of BTC uh should have bought more but when kind of 2016 came rolling back I sort of like started taking crypto much more

seriously and have been doing one thing or another in crypto since nice very cool man um well I I want to uh you know maybe rewind the clock back to 2019 and get your perspective um because you know at that time I I kind of listened in on this hour and a half episode that you did with PP you're were talking about Bitcoin and you kind of represented what at the time I'm not sure people were calling it this but kind of this very Bitcoin maximalist uh Viewpoint where you know Bitcoin had these very attractive monetary properties um you are kind of not super excited about or bullish on other altcoins uh and actually you were so bullish on bitcoin I went back and listed to the episode this morning you had a uh $160 trillion price prediction for the market cap of Bitcoin so $10 million per Bitcoin and

so I want to get your like what's your current stance on bitcoin do you stand by those sort of price predictions or would you still describe yourself as kind of a Bitcoin first thinker when it comes to crypto investing or what's your perspective on bitcoin these days yeah so literally nothing has changed about my view since then uh I stand by every single statement that was made during that podcast and my target is still the same 200 trillion in in today's dollars uh I think that's totally reasonable uh the logic is simple uh I believe the global money supply kind of like measured in today's dollars is like 100 105 trillion and that's kind of with this inflationary money which is a subpar product for what it does so if you

actually have a deflationary money call it a 2X Improvement in in in product Market fit you can easily have double uh double the market cap because right now a lot of that is kind of being replaced by real estate and stocks and bonds and uh I'm I'm sure you understand where I'm going with this so um if it's kind of like a pure Neo gold with even Superior like mathematical qualities than gold itself then it can easily be 200 trillion I don't think that's crazy at all so uh to put it briefly I nothing about My Views have changed and when it comes to stores of value I am as much of a Bitcoin maximalist as I've ever was you know I think a lot of the arguments that you referenced during that podcast

you know you were talking about M2 creation and you know you were kind of confined to the 2019 statistics where you know we increased the M2 money supply by 6% and you know little did you know that in the next uh you know the next five years after that there was going to be something like 60 or 70% of all the money that's ever been printed by the US was going to get created in the next five years and you were talking initially about some some seizure seizures from overactive governments and things like that and obviously that massively accelerated in the five years so I think a lot of you know what you mentioned in that podcast is arguments in terms of being pro Bitcoin definitely stands the test of time so help me th uh like connect these two versions of yourself because one you've got marad

the Bitcoin maximalist and most of the Bitcoin maximalists that I know or follow don't really look too kindly on memec coins right they have a very disparaging sort of view of it or anything that isn't necessarily Bitcoin it's a you know a distraction at best and kind of um uh you know there there's obviously a worse way of looking at it as well so walk us through how did you get from like help help us bridge the gap there in between these two sides of you yeah for sure but we so first of all we need to understand that your opinions as a um Trader and then your opinions as kind of a long-term investor and then your opinions as as sort of like a monetary guy and your opinions like from an ideology perspect like those can all

be completely different right so depending on the angle from which you view the situation your opinion would be different um I actually as crazy as it sounds think that sort of the the thousands of blogs and books and all of that Bitcoin Maximus literature is was kind of like perfect preparation to understand meme coins and the reason for that is um can be concisely explained with horseshoe Theory which um I'm sure you've heard about before the sense being that a lot of people look at many different things but for example the uh kind of political Spectrum as a line where where the far right and far left

for example are the Polar Opposites right but a lot of people have noted the extreme similarities between the two and really they are much more similar than they are different right yeah I think that the mcoin super cycle which is currently in my opinion underway or in the early stages of it are obviously a byproduct of kind of like the VC token industrial complex that exists in crypto which itself is a byproduct of kind of like the Fiat monetary system right so uh meme coins

existing it they they they kind of arise emergently because of outside forces right and if you study sort of a dozen or so Trends inside the crypto industry and combine them with a dozen or so trends that are kind of happening in the World At Large the fact that something like this is happening starts to be seen as less crazy right but um Bitcoin is is a money right but meme coins they are not a money some people think of them as social currencies I don't believe they are um they are something different altogether and uh however there are many things uh which Bitcoin and memecoins

share at least the best ones and that is sort of their extreme cess right their extreme almost like a Neo religious type Zeal that their holders embody and from that particular perspective there are a ton of similarities right I don't want to kind of run ahead of myself but um definitely happy to dig deeper into that topic uh kind of in the in the in the coming minutes yeah okay so there's a ton that I want to dig on there dig in there with you so I love the I love the horeshoe theory I actually just finished watching pey blinders was a great speech I don't know if you ever seen that show but it's a great speech that the prot gives about you know he's referring to

Fascism and socialism and he's like you know you go far enough on the right and the left and you meet and then there's just me in the middle trying to have an honest business I was like damn I bet a lot of people feel like that at the current moment but here's the way that I would connect uh Bitcoin and meme coins is that there's the same underlying Catalyst and driver and the same underlying Catalyst and driver is this structural issue with the credit-based Fiat system that we all have right the money is breaking and so there are a couple of on the one hand what that should do is push people towards a much more fundamentally sound alternative right which is Bitcoin the other thing that a breaking Fiat uh currency system does is push people towards speculation right this happens during periods of

inflation as well uh just hey you know my money's depreciating and there's no way to get ahead so I might as well take these really super risky behaviors and just gamble right and so there's the same underlying cause but it manifests itself in very different ways and so on the one hand if you're you know if you're bu on bitcoin the irony is you should probably be really bullish on things like meme coins and maybe previously this was nfts and things like that is that roughly the way that you see them or or I don't know what what's your thought on that yeah I mean you I I'm pretty much aligned with what you just described um it pretty much boils down to empathizing with retail because if this particular cycle that we

are in is anywhere even remotely similar to the past two or three recycles in crypto then the we need to understand that kind of like the the altcoin complex that exists the VC business model that exists in crypto um and the parabas that often occur in kind of year four of these Cycles none of these can exist without an a sudden influx of retail right and if you kind of mic microeconomic put yourself in the shoes of a retail person they probably understand that again if they kind of like mirror think

and they sort of anticipate some kind of a parabola in 2025 they know that the 3x or whatever that Bitcoin still might have in it is not going to sort of change their life so to speak right and of course of course Bitcoin is sound money and I expect it to eventually become the global monetary Reserve however it is going to take time this is probably a 15 to 25 year Affair in general right and so because this inflation and this sort of expansion in global money supply pushes

people further down the risk curve right we need to understand for example if we look at 200 16 2017 that was the cycle of kind of ethereum icos and altcoins right four years later 2021 we had Defi gamei nfts and like a lot of like Ponzi or ponic like like experiments as well as some like metaverse stuff like in late 2021 right yeah now the way way I see it is the rapidly growing money supply

around the world is mentally affecting um kind of people's mental health and also possibly even people's hormones like at a molecular level a lot of like not many people make a connection between like Fiat money and mental health but bitcoiners talk about that a lot uh and they've been talking about this since like 2014 and this is why I jokingly say that all of the Bitcoin Maxi literature was kind of perfect preparation for this because um I I jokingly say that we will probably see viar before we see label Epoch right and so essentially I think

that we will see hyper mem coinizy hyperbitcoinization right and uh it is logic in my mind that the core altcoin Narrative of each cycle needs to become quote unquote crazier right and even Beyond crypto if you look at Financial Bubbles and technological bubbles the asset class or the asset category that particularly lends itself well to parabolas or bubble like formation it's things that are difficult to value it's things that people don't really

have a clear framework or a clear consensus as to how to price them and in from this particular perspective I think the fact that Meme coins don't have any revenue and in fact they take this a level further and they don't even offer a technological product or any sort of software or a platform it's actually a huge Advantage it's actually a gigantic advantage in fact uh because and I and I know this sounds like weird and almost sort of I paradoxical but um if there's no clear metrics other than price itself and a few derivatives of price then it

is a perfect product for these sort of parabolic type moves to occur and again as I'm saying this you please differentiate between me sort of the multi- deade predictor and me the sort of like the two years out person who's trying to find like the biggest category outperformers right because these are two separate jobs let me try to knit some of this together with I'm G to amend what I originally said to you here I'm still going to stick with this idea that there's the same structural cause here with this this depreciation of money and people feeling like it's like the Frog boiling in water slowly right and what that's causing is people don't feel like they have a path to attain the same wealth that their parents did and so they're seeking these alternative

methods and on the one hand you have the thing which is probably long-term sustainable which is just a better or uh a different type of money that has properties which are very different from Fiat currencies but then there's the other behavior that this all induces which is basically people wanting to go to the casino and press the red button until they solve their financial problems and if you look throughout the course of uh history in crypto there have been these cycles of different altcoins and they kind of have to get more and more ridiculous each time and that actually kind of mirror what you see in you know with injections of Fiat money it has to get bigger and bigger each time have the same effect right this is the an like the analogy of the drug addict getting the hero when you need a bigger and bigger shot to

chase the same amount of high and so what we originally had was icos these were things that promised to be onchain businesses right okay I can buy it as a premise and then there was actually defi summer um which is like hey there there was actually a lot of very real stuff there and then there was kind of onchain jpegs it was like okay I can squint on this this is the future of art art is sometimes worth a lot of money and I really understand that and then there was the metaverse it's like okay we're really reaching here but now we have to just get crazier and crazier and crazier and he's just like hey guys what if we just there's nothing here at all there's nothing to get away from like the very pure ridiculous thing here which is just that we just want to make this number go

up it's almost like you know we're on fast 10 here right this is uh this is Dom and The Rock You Know jumping over highways and stuff like that with their cars so is that roughly right and at the end of the day I guess this is this is all building to this question at the end of the day do you see any fundamental value with meme coins or maybe any of these past generations of you know altcoins or nfts or whatever or do you think that they're destined to just kind of wash away against the value of something like Bitcoin I don't think so a lot of uh VCS and sort of Technology focused analysts they handwave meme coins away as pure brain rot and pure degeneracy

and pure hyper gambling I do not think that that is correct um I do think they have utility and I would love to tell you why I think that's the case um and we can of course debate uh at a particular snapshot in time whether a particular meme coin or a complex of meme coins is overvalued or undervalued but uh I stress that the utility is not zero and let me tell you and let me tell you why but I think it would be helpful like in order to understand meme coins you need to understand like the past history of altcoin cycles and if you

don't mind I would like to sort of give the audience a brief overview right uh but specifically like I don't want to go way too back all the way back to 2013 2014 when the earliest altcoins came about but I I'll specifically focus on kind of 2021 2022 2023 right sure recent history recent history so there's several things happening um on like the altcoin side of crypto that in my opinion have essentially like forced meme coins to like come to the Forefront a we have a massive over production of tokens altcoins all kinds of all kinds of things right this is kind of a sort of a bitter truth that I believe in I

believe that crypto industry is an asset production industry that is masquerading as a software production industry right explain that so I I'll explain it through the several three or four bullet points um first of all there's a massive overproduction of tokens of all kinds and this is this includes Tech tokens VCB tokens uh onchain tokens meme coin there's just all all of them there's just way too many of them um second of all all of this tier one centralized exchange list things by the time they actually happen the the like the non-cam or like the decently good projects at least from

a purely software perspective um they're valued at like 8 10 sometimes even 15 20 billion so obviously any retail buyer I mean they're just going to inevitably suffer a negative 85% we've seen this over and over this year if you actually look at all of the 45 binance listings that have happened this year so far every single one of them is down except uh whiff which is a mcoin and except Jupiter which is essentially mcoin trading infrastructure literally all of the other like 43 of them are down right that that in and of itself should tell you something second of all and this is obviously related to the previous point is that all of like the altcoin gains or all of the altcoin

essentially like valuation increases have been relegated to the private rounds right uh series a series B CED Etc and by the time it actually is liquid it's just way too expensive um the problem with this is that this doesn't build community and airdrops which the way I see it is just a sort of like a bribe to make CT hate them less is essentially like they they don't that doesn't build community at all what builds Community is like a journey so a snapshot is not enough like you need to have people that have been there from the start um and I'll I'll talk about that more later and essentially the other reason is um even if you put tokens aside um if you look at all of the projects in

crypto history that have had any kind of product Market fit literally every single one of them is speculation related right so Unis swap poly Market hyper liquid dydx GMX uh roll bit Shuffle etc etc etc like literally every single one is either directly speculation enabling or benefiting from speculation right um frankly other than BTC stable coins and various forms of speculation I'm not even sure what the fourth biggest product Market fit sort of category in crypto is but whatever it is it's like a distant fourth you know um furthermore um

99.999% of altcoins simply don't produce the kind of Revenue that would justify their valuation without naming names but I'm pretty sure that you can have like 12 examples in in your mind uh there's a doz there's dozens of products that are making like $500 per day in Revenue but uh they're valued at like8 billion valuations so like obviously there's a mismatch and a lot of the founders and nvcs and sort of the various sort of uh thinkpiece writers they sort of hide under the veneer of Regulation saying that oh like we we don't give re we don't distribute revenues because like the regulations are unclear but the

reality is that that's just an excuse because if they did sort of distribute revenues in one way or another then that would enable investment banker types to have like a clear valuation framework plug it into an Excel spreadsheet and then they would realize that the fair value of these projects based on cash flow alone should be 80 million not 8 billion you know and so it's so so it's yeah I I agree with that but can I push back on one little thing which is just that that I I think those are there's the okay does this project generate revenue and then there's does it redistribute that Revenue to token holders and the DCF types can still back into the valuation whether or not they the tokens get or the cash flows get

redistributed right so isn't that kind ofing to I I was going I was going to mention that in the next bullet point um so even if you look at um even if you look at the crypto projects that actually do produce a lot of Revenue um you know if you look at their performance uh since the beginning of the year it's really quite a mixed bag um I mean yes things like avit is up things like banana is up but then there's 15 to 20 projects that I could list off the top of my head that um make over $25 million a year but are like

they're perform performance has been lackluster not just in 2024 their performance has been lackluster for a while which to me is the market telling that crypto markets they don't seem to Value Revenue as much as they value hype and uh the way I see it as we move further and further into the inflationary Paradigm in the global economy attention will be value valued more relative to fundamentals and cash flows with every passing day I think that statement will continue to be more and more true why because um any sort of cash flow-based products in a

sustainable economy um they need sort of years to mature and they sort of imply a decade of future cash flows in order to get the current um sort of in order to back out the current valuation but I think increasingly people come to crypto I think that's always been the case people came to crypto for those parabas for those crazy Moves In order to catch those like insane like wild price moves and as even the legit D5 projects mature they sort of become more equity-like and I don't think that that's the stuff that retail is looking for you know we can we can argue whether institutional investors are going to have demand for those kinds of products

maybe maybe not but personally I'm focused on sort of trying to predict what retail is going to do next year or or in the next year and a half and to me that's not what they want and I think price performance of these coins since January 1 of this year is a testament to my thesis last but not least we have a gigantic amount of unlocks coming in the next four to five years binance re research themselves have put out a piece I believe a couple of months ago saying that there is like 160 billion worth of unlocks that are going to hit the market in the next three four years so just in general that's a massive headwind to any kind of price Discovery finally uh the market Consciousness and and this

includes both retail and institutions they know that do has gone to 100 billion in the past uh shibba Inu has gone to 50 billion in the past Pepe has gone to 8 billion this year whiff have has gone to five billion this year none of these things have a an underlying software and uh there's a few more examples from 2021 putting all of this together this is proof that the market knows that tokens can go parabolic without a product and without any kind of Revenue so this is not no longer a matter of debate and a lot of people are starting to believe in the self-fulfilling prophecy that if we already have six or seven of those examples and last cycle wasn't even a

meme coin Focus cycle then we we could extrapolate this and we can see this at a much bigger scale this time around and if you buy the idea that the core altcoin narrative needs to get crazier and crazier mem coins are a perfect fit finally um if you study past Cycles uh the categories that outperform the most in year three which in this case is 2016 2020 and 2024 end up being the categories that go straight parabolic and Ballistic in the subsequent year which in this sort of example is 2017 2021 and 20 25 respectively again if you go on coin market cap and you check out the first

three pages today which is uh like the top 300 crypto Assets in the world by market cap roughly you will see that uh and many people have talked about this very few things have outperformed BTC this year right obviously the bulk of institutional money is just going straight into BTC and avoiding altcoins altogether so there's a major dispersion happening this is a maturation of the space and if you look at the only 42 things that have outperformed Bitcoin this year um at the like the the the 13 of them at the very top are memes there's some AI stuff at the bottom as well some infrastructure stuff at the bottom as well but with the latter we're talking about 80% 150% returns while with memes

you have multiple things that have gone up 10x or more uh and I'm sure you've noticed this as well and so to me I think a lot of people uh that are need deep in uh Tech alts and Tech Al stfts uh they want to Gaslight you into believing that the Mania quote unquote we had in March 2024 was like the top of memes however I think that was only one of three parabas and the way I see it there is two giant parabas that are yet to come in 2025 and I strongly believe and I can give you another 70 reasons why 2025 is going to be dominated by me memes um and

I think that we are in the middle of the mcoin super cycle specifically I think this is a memec coin cycle and next year me coins are going to be on the Forefront of every media piece newspaper social media and we are still super early hey everyone this episode is brought to you by namada the shielded asset Hub protecting the future of the multichain NADA is a chain that's near and dear to my heart because in previous seasons of B curve we've talked about how the Cardinal original sin of most blockchains is not thinking about privacy from the beginning but also because if we want to onboard a whole bunch of applications it doesn't work in a default transparency setting so NADA not only brings about a better future that we all want but it's going to help on board a ton of new applications so

NADA introduces a novel shielding reward system the way that it works is if you hold your assets in the shielded set you help strengthen nada's data protection guarantees and collect nonrewards in return the model will initially support IBC and ethereum based assets but eventually the idea is this to expand into a comprehensive hub for all assets really really excited about what the folks over at NADA are doing I highly recommend that you go and check them out at n.net you can follow their mainnet launch which is zoom TM very exciting tell them that I sent you click the link bottom of the show notes hey everyone this episode is brought to you by Supra the new blazing fast vertically integrated L1 which helps you scale your D if you are a builder you're probably dealing with some combination of cost complexity and fragmentation of existing

Solutions so you're building over an E2 land everything's feeling a little bit fragmented at the moment if you're building in salana everything is fast and on one layer but maybe you're limited in terms of what you can do with your app space so Supra is rolling out a new product called Supra containers you can head over to Supras super.com containers um to learn more they offer dedicated customizable app spaces running on supra's 500,000 TPS layer one blockchain that gives you complete control over gas tokens and fees so some cool things you can do you get the freedom to you can use your own token create local fee markets or even go gasless whatever you want so this product isn't live yet but because you're a faithful listener of bell curve you get notified first so head over to supra.com

Containers thank me later all right I've got some I've got some follow-up questions for you here so you know looking back at uh past Cycles I think one of the you know one of the trends is there's there's kind of this new innovation right which could be nfts or defi or whatever um or like Po like yield farming is probably a pretty good example of that and there's a bunch of money that's being made originally but then because we're dealing in things that are digital uh you know the barriers to creating new Supply end up going down the supply ends up going up and then price ends up collapsing in on itself and the example that I would give you is you know people love to blame uh nft you know nft prices on blur right which is as soon as there was liquidity

everyone that was bag holding jpegs that were worth $40,000 had this incentive to sell they were like maybe we'll never see this again and then the market ended up uh collapsing and so you know you can make the same analogy with something like pump. fun where there was like 5,000 memes being turned out on a daily basis so what is to stop this Dynamic of bringing on so much Supply that you inevitably end up drowning the price from happening to meme coins yeah so that's a fantastic question that's actually a question I get the most from anybody uh I talk to meme coins about um this is what this is how I see the situation there are already I believe three or four million meme coins and I think by the end of next year it's

probably going to be like a 100 million 200 million it could it it might as well be Infinity but it doesn't matter um I think what pump fund does it accelerates the split of the mem coin asset class into two categories one is uh what we call PVP uh and which what also known as Hyper gambling and that's essentially like super short-term scalps like one day old mes like immediate launches like quick rugs uh trying to turn like one Soul into 20 soul and essentially pump on itself like very very fast very short attention span things right and that's pretty much like 99% of all memein

99.999999% of all mem coins and that's going to continue to be the case then on the other side you have something what we jokingly refer to as PVE and for lack of a better example that's essentially people trying to have build the next dose uh that's people genuinely believing in like 1050 billion market caps that's people trying to build like a longlasting movement longlasting brand a cult like like we like we call them maybe even something that's going to be multicycle right and personally what I'm focused on is the ladder and what I advise everybody to focus on is the ladder the way I see it is and this is a very important concept that you brought up uh memec coin production per day right uh back when whff andp that were

coming about in November December 2023 the meon production per day was like 200 300 per day right today it's like 5,000 per day um a couple of months from now it's going to be 50,000 per day and at the peak of the Mania it might even be 1 million per day who knows right ultimately the way I see it is a pyramid and at the pyramid you essentially have at the very bottom you have like you have trash you have shitcoins excuse my French and there's going to be like quadrillion of them it doesn't matter then you go a little bit higher you have like something with a bit more meaning a bit more longevity and so on and so forth and you kind of reach a point where let's say you have a hundred solid memes with a solid

Community I think you identify those 100 within those 100 you're going to have 20 to 25 of what I call as Cults within those two 20 to 25 Cults you're going to have five to 10 things which are going to be like lifestyle brands or that are going to be consumer brands or whatever and then within those 10 you're going to have five things which I personally refer to as like movements or Mission coins and ultimately at the very very very far end um who knows whether they're going to emerge or not I believe they they will some people think I'm crazy but essentially I think one or two of them will get close to being what I think are going to be like Neo religions essentially and this is a little bit

like more sci-fi and a little bit more out there but essentially like I've listed to you all of the trends inside our industry right but again like I've said at the beginning of our call um there's also things happening outside in the world and not just in the past four years like in the past 15 years there's a lot of Trends right um essentially like loneliness is skyrocketing mental health issues are skyrocketing uh like fertility is dropping um like family formation is dropping and a lot of this is also tied together with the fact that religion is at the risk of sounding Blasphemous um losing product Market fit in the developed world and if you

actually look at what religion is it's a very multi-dimensional topic and it's essentially a Swiss army knife offering a bunch of different things to people right to some people around the world it's offering Community for others it's offering guidance for other it's offering Something to Believe In and a feeling of being um a part of something greater than yourself of course it's also offering sort of Lifestyle advice guidance answers to very difficult questions about existence and so on and so forth I'm sure you can sense where I'm getting with this and what I think is going to happen I actually think it's already been happening since 2005 2010 different brands and different

communities uh in the world in the SEC in the secular world they're essentially unbundling religion right they're unbundling religion and you can see glimpses of this with uh video games with yoga with burning man with keto and veganism and different diets with like Soul cycle with like lifting and like gym Lifestyles with carnivore but also you see this with different assets I'm sure you've noticed how extremely culty both the brand and the asset is for Tesla for Apple stock for gme that we've seen uh in 2021 and notably for Bitcoin um and you

can also if if you've been in the trenches you know how unbelievably culti Dogecoin and shibba Inu communities have been not only in 2020 and 2021 but also even before then and to some extent even right now and you've been if you've been particularly in the trenches today you know how this applies to the new crop of meme coins as well right um and I think and this is kind of the Crux of my thesis the Crux of my thesis is the following it's the fact that people are waking up to the truth that in crypto the token is the product the the software is not the primary product

that's the secondary product maybe even a tertiary product the core product is the token and that has always been the case that's been the case for the past 11 years and so meme coins they are a Counterattack of the trenches they are a populist movement because people are tired of VC's having monopolized the wealth creation from Crypt Tech and cryptotech tokens people are realizing that all tokens and it doesn't matter if it's a tech token or a meme token all of them are simply tables at the CA and so the 20year olds have started to ask themselves why should we play at your

tables which launch at $5 billion valuations and don't really have any users anyway uh when we can have our own tables now I actually don't care whether something is an altcoin or with with a GitHub or it's a memec coin now what actually matters is something completely different what I'm am coming to real realization in the past 6 months is that altcoins are have actually never been about technology and mcoins are actually not about memes either and this applies to nfts as well what all of these things are uh they are simply tokenized communities they're tokenized groups of people with a financialized

token layer and they're essentially simply using different techniques and different narratives in order to recruit people for their cause in order to recruit people grow the Community obviously as the community grows prize grows as well right and so if you under if you if you agree with me that the token is the product rather than the software then the the code itself never actually mattered because if you put yourself in the shoes of an average retail participant which is the people that caus the parabas in the first place they never cared about tech and they never will care about tech in their life um what they actually care about is and and like they don't care about some blockchain being more private or faster or ZK snarks they don't care what they

care about is probably to the greatest extent making money uh having fun and belonging and if you accept this if you accept this thesis then you actually realize that Meme coins are a better product than uh altcoins because um they are simpler there's no unlocks uh everything is circulating uh they don't have any of the countless problems that nfts have had they don't have any of the countless bugs that defi smart contract platforms have and so on and so forth I'm sure if any of you guys have been following my Twitter you've seen a list of 50 things in which I think mcoins are better than altcoins right and so if you agree with me that the token is the

product then it's clear that mem coins have Superior product Market fit so essentially tying all of this together you want to find PVE Cults that can become movements can become Brands can even become multicycle Neo religions and that's how you make the next 100x maybe even thousand X in crypto in 2025 simple as that how do you okay so how do you actually determine what is a good cult in this framework you know I've seen you tweet about this and this is where I'll record a little section at the top of this but not Financial advice none of this is financial advice do your own research Etc but you tweet about this a lot anyway Mor so I'm going to use actual names which is like popcat and Giga right uh as potential communities

here do you walk us through obviously don't review uh any state Secrets or you know any proprietary sort of Secret Sauce that you have but like do you give us a sense like how do you diligence whether or not these you know Cults have the potential to endure many generations like what are you what are you looking for here yeah so that's a great question and I'd just like to briefly return to my previous Point um you know if you actually look at at traditional Tech out um I think you would agree with me that some of it valuation factor is legitimate and some of it valuation factor is like narrative driven or sort of mimetic right I think um if you look at legit altcoins their uh sort of legit

valuation component is something along the lines of uh kind of like probability times magnitude of future revenue and then people the investors essentially hope that there's going to be some kind of a fee switch in the future and they extrapolate with that but still that's like 10 to 20% of the equation with the other 70 to 80% of the equation just based on the nature of the crypto space it's speculative it's mimetic right now I actually tend to think it's kind of bearish when like these meme coins end up being like hey this is our plan for utility you know I joke about this but it's abely what that's not why anyone is buying you stop trying to do that honestly just pump out more meem toally like make laugh uh totally agree with

you you yes yes I totally agree with you because revenues are bearish in a hyperinflationary economy uh you want maximum attention and you don't want revenues because revenues essentially tether you to some kind of a metric which creates a ceiling you know this is by the way if you look at memec coin history a lot of them uh create utility in their markets because they want to floor if you actually like study like utility in Revenue uh you will realize that like utility and revenue they create a floor but they also create a ceiling so essentially like relatively speaking a utility and revenue they're good in bare markets but they're bad in Bull markets right anyways um the point I'm trying to make is that I don't think mecoin utility is zero because I think you need to look at um you know SAS

software as a service it's often offered as like a B2B or a b2c uh like service right I think the correct way to analyze meme coins is as a ctoc uh service so it's like a customer to customer service essentially like I've been saying it's a tokenized community and I really want to stress the fact that the utility is not zero because uh if you actually look at the best meme coins it's a lot of the things that I mentioned right It's Entertainment it's a collective artistic expression it's sort of a shared reality a shared Universe it's um hope it's friendships it's Community it's like loneliness reduction and as people like

spend more and more hours per day on average online around the world it effectively becomes like a social Guild like an MMO RPG Guild and believe me for Lonely People the value of that is nonzero and ultimately it doesn't matter that there is no revenues because essentially instead of revenues people participate in these services or they buy the services by simply buying the token so revenue is essentially expressed by the capital appreciation of the price uh finally all of this is without even mentioning the token itself which offers volatility and is like a trading vehicle right so um mcoins definitely like definitely the mcoin valuation is like 90% speculative or

mimetic or narrative driven but I do want to stress the fact that there is some kind of a non-zero utility here and like very few people talk about this you know people like 99% of people just say oh it's just like degeneracy but it's not you know it's it's not yes these things can be overv valid and they're probably going to be crazy overv valid next year here but please understand that the utility is there right and so how do you identify Cults you need to look at the list of things I mentioned and essentially compare which one of them does those Services better you know offers those Services better and um this is a big reason why I believe I have multiple theories like one of my

theories is that we're eventually going to see a transition away from uh joke coins to like more serious meme coins that's one two we're going to see a transition from animal coins to non-animal coins right um and and so on and so forth because if you tell an average person on the street or even in crypto the word meme coin they think oh it's like a funny dog or it's a funny cat right but if you actually think of it it's really just a group of people with kind of a token uniting them so it can be literally anything and I look at the blockchain distribution a lot I look at the genie coefficient a lot I look at who the

whales are who the supporters are on social media who they are you know everybody in crypto knows each other it's a relatively small space um very interconnected space so ultimately it boils down to people and the quality of the people the quality of the community it's going to Define how far the coin is going to go last but not least I look at the nature of the meme itself I I think being a real meme like Doge like Pepe like Giga these are these are things that have existed for years before they became tokenized and I think that's going to be a major advantage uh because when it's going to be a kesian beauty contest next year right in a game in a game theoretic search for a shelling

point so people are going to be magnetized by things that they've already seen in the past um so that's like one factor there's many other factors and the other thing is obviously like I said that the ultimate dream of a meme coin is to become the next religion so you want to hang out in their discords in their telegrams in their social spaces and see like how much of a cult or how much of a like a passion how much of a religious vibe there is in that Community it this is not exactly like quantitative or sometimes difficult to quantify but you can get a sense for this you know it's a little bit subjective but you can get a sense for this last but not least I am particularly bullish like I've already mentioned on things that and this is kind of my next big Theory right now is

um mem coin started with essentially tokenizing like funny dog pictures and cute cat pictures or whatever but I think the next evolution is a little bit more abstract and we're going to start to see tokenization of ideas tokenization of philosophies tokenization of ideologies you you see you see where I'm going with this and It ultimately boils down to the average inspiration per capita right because I think these movement coins and Mission coins some of them are going to go to hundred billion do valuations or more and the reason for that is something we call free cult labor free cult labor essentially is people

working for their bags crudely crudely speaking and different communities do it to different extents but if somebody's super passionate about this meme coin or this meme or this idea they will and and a lot of these holders are like Engineers designers influencers writers Etc they will offer their labor for free uh and a lot of this labor they would charge an outside company $5,000 $110,000 to do but for the sake of their mecoin for the sake of their bags crudely speaking they're going to do it for free and so you need to ask yourself which meme coins are going to trigger the most free cult labor and in Silicon Valley speak it essentially collapses user acquisition cost to zero you know what I mean and so um the reason I believe in movement

coins and Mission coins so much is because my theory is that they're going to trigger like a much bigger amount of inspiration in a person I think when you look at dog coins and Cat coins and animal coins they like people will probably not be like jumping out of bed at 5:30 in the morning just to like hustle for the sake of it quite as much as something with a bit more substance to it right so this is kind of like Loosely the framework and the theories that I have and I'm kind of on the lookout for as crazy as it sounds for like the next like religion for the next movement for like the next crazy thing all right Mar I've got something to run by you here the what if I told you there was a meme coin you know that wasn't necessarily uh you know based on the

picture of a dog or a cat or something like that but it was based around a set of values um and this set of values was sort of like a um you know a stoic lifestyle um it's on saving instead of spending um it's on eating meat um and it's on uh custody your own assets is Bitcoin you know so like that was kind of a a you know TR buildup here to you know a lot of what you're describing right the way that you view these meme assets you know it's kind of like what's the difference between a cult and a religion I actually got asked that by my history teacher in sixth grade and the only the answer ended up being scale and so my question to you is is Bitcoin a meme coin um so Bitcoin is the original cult it is the strongest uh it is the

strongest cult in crypto by far it might actually be the strongest cult around a financial asset ever created and that will continue to be the case for many decades um so this is actually exact like what you're implying here is exactly why I brought up uh horseshoe Theory initially is that even though Bitcoin is a money and memec coins are something else uh that cult element is something that's in the middle of their vent diagram right and ultimately um I think BTC is a special case because I think there is true utility because in the blockchain that it offers um there

are certain anxiety reducing uh sort of guarantees or near guarantees that provide a service and that service is sort of obviously like a near certainty about like no future Printing and uh sort of the the certainty around unse ability of your currency units right uh so every asset in the world has a mimetic component to a different extent right and I think like things like uh maker or fra or whatever they have like a smaller memetic component and like a much bigger like uh how should I say this fundamental component right I think

I think BTC as a Neo gold replacer it has a fundamental component but without a doubt there is that mimic premium that cult premium there as well right so it's like each of these crypto assets they need to be analyzed as a sum of these various Premia does that make sense but without a doubt without a doubt Bitcoin is a like a a Neo religious movement for sure it you know it just it's funny the way that you describe this as maybe being the next evolution of these sort of tokenized communities where you know if you look at that the way that l1s have developed is they don't just okay there are the there are the technical set of trade-offs on what the L1 actually does right like you can build smart contracts on ethereum you you know

it's not really possible to do that on bitcoin and salana is a lot faster and they know they want to do it all on one layer instead of scaling into multiple layers but the other funny thing about the difference in the technical architecture of each of these l1s is that there is very much a type of guy or gal that subscribes to this and Bitcoin is kind of like the original it's kind of like the Catholic Church of uh of of cryptos right it's very kind of rich igid uh it's stoic uh it's pure right and then you know ethereum evolved as a counter counter reaction I think to that a lot of it's based off obviously vitalik's personality but it's like optimistic and what if and idealistic and what if we could do this and very open and everyone com and I'm gonna get

on stage in a unicorn outfit and and dance around and that's the vibe right and then salana is a counter reaction to that right and the the values of the people in that Community are I'm product oriented I'm engineering oriented I'm pragmatic I'm a shipper I don't care about all of this you know fofy doofy stuff don't tell me about you know auction this and mechanism that and ZK whatever I just want to ship product uh and it's just funny it's it what you're describing right uh is is actually kind of already manifest in some of these L1 tokens at least is the way that I see it absolutely and l1s can definitely be studied as sort of the churches of the modern day and there's without a doubt that premium there I jokingly I jokingly told some somebody a few weeks ago I

said Bitcoin is the Church of Purity um salana is the Church of degeneracy and ethereum is like a weird in between and that's why it's underperforming this cycle um because at least from that like mimetic perspective because BTC optimizes for like the store of value monetary uh aspects and salana optimizes for sort of like the performance uh side of it right and then ethereum is like a middle ground between the two um and so it's like it doesn't it doesn't go all in in either and it's kind of stuck in this middle zone right

yeah and don't don't get me wrong I think if BTC goes to like 75k 100k or higher this cycle ethereum will probably have pockets of outperformance and and and it will probably end up doing well but to be completely blunt I am not a super super longterm like on on 30-year time scales um like if I went into like a 30-year coma I would prefer to have the vast majority of it in BTC because I don't think like we can analyze ethereum and salana from like the technical point of view but I have a very particular opinion on why ethereum

and salana tokens both got monetized and essentially I view them as simply Grand casinos I think ethereum uh became a quasi money in uh 2017 um during the Ico era in order to gamble on the icos in order to speculate or invest in in icos you simply needed to have eth in your wallets and as a lot of those eth are sitting I idly in the metamask wallets that that factor at scale it monetized the currency that that same Dynam that same Dynamic continued in 2020 2021 um in order to participate in all the ponies in order to participate in

defi in order to participate in yield farming you needed the E units and that all of that demand to gamble quote unquote it drives the global demand to store eth in your wallet and that effect essentially leads to this quasy monetization of currency if the exact same thing Isen happening on salana right now with meme coins whether you're needing to buy PVP meme coins or PVE meme coins you need to have some salana to do it you need to pay gas to do it and to some extent salana defi drives that sole demand as well but without this sort of desire to gamble these neither eth nor Soul would be valued where they are and ultimately

if you compare them to BTC purely from a monetary point of view if I was a sovereign wealth fund or a billionaire I would be putting the vast majority of my trust into BTC because I don't care about any like I don't care about those small scale gambles right I care about the absolute Purity and robustness of the Neo gold so I pretty like yes eth could go to 10K and soul could go to a thousand but on like multicycle Tim lengths I think think BTC is going to absorb the vast majority of that monetary premium I've got a maybe broader question for you just about Cycles in

general um you know you you you're obviously a student of history and have paid pretty close attention to different crypto cycles and something that people love to debate about is like the four-year cycle Etc and I would love to get your perspective here on whether or not you think that that is still going to be a thing and I I intuiting a little bit but it seems like your kind of your view of the world is it's going to be highly inflationary you know there's going to be some sort of hyperinflation and maybe like even a social conflict um and so I'd be curious like what's your sort of view of the future when it comes to bitcoin cycles and then how does this sort of end and how is there eventually a ShakeOut you know from the rest of these maybe not so you know long lasting

assets that everyone's playing around in today uh so that's a great question there are many theories around this uh a lot of people believe that the 4-year cycle isn't so much due to the BTC Mining and haling Dynamics but rather because there are some believe three and a half year Cycles in traditional macro some believe there are four and a half year Cycles in traditional macro and then the having of BTC is like somewhat coincidental with those um I'm sure I'm sure you've heard of many of those as well um so to me um it's not so much about BTC halving as it is about uh what's going on in sort

of trafi and the global liquidity and central banks in general and these sort of sinewave like liquidity cycles that we've been witnessing um in like in the past few decades right my gut feel is that eventually the fouryear Cycles will break down right um whether this is going to happen this cycle I don't know I kind of think it's going to be a fouryear cycle again just because like it's kind of like a self-fulfilling prophecy um and like people are positioning and preparing and talking about it a lot and so it's almost people are almost like coping each other into kind of like making that happen so to speak right um but

ultimately I think at some point there is going to be a period where the SNP 500 is going to have a decade of underperformance if not stagnation in real terms and during that period uh crypto industry probably underperforms relative to past Cycles as well so that's one uh two if we get a recession of some kind either in late 2020s or early 2030s or whatever um crypto will probably suffer as well

um and not just price-wise like TimeWise that bare Market might be longer than the usual yearlong bare markets that we've seen in the past so um the future is uncertain but I think at some point um the fouryear Cycles will break down and as crypto matures uh that will only make sense not to mention that the actual having has a like a less and less uh effect because I mean we've gone from uh like 6% or 3% to to to like lower and so um it's just like not moving the needle as much anymore but ultimately um the the the variable that

predicts uh BTC performance the most is uh year on-year rate of uh Global Supply uh Global money supply GR growth so that's probably the variable that you want to be paying attention to the most um and it it it it it itself has had these four years oh like 3.7 year Cycles or whatever and I think that crypto has mirrored that um but if like whatever happens to the global money supply that's what's probably like Bitcoin is probably GNA like be counter reaction to that yeah what do you think about nfts um you know the way that you talk about mcoins is how I had originally conceived of nfts these on online communities you know they're not particularly large but

they're extremely engaged and there was obviously a massive price run up for a bunch of different NFD communities and has it really fully recovered um I'd be curious what what are your thoughts on nfts in general they're the same thing they're they're the exact same thing but uh there are certain dynamics that are going to make mem coins become a 100 times bigger than nfts so first of all um if you look at a typical successful NFD collection what you usually end up having is 3,000 or so holders uh promoting 10,000 illiquid jpegs which obviously runs into certain constraints and certain ceilings as far as Community growth goes and uh so

there's also the prohibitively expensive notion of a floor price when it comes to successful NFD collections which let's be real um the less fortunate cannot afford M however meme coins are essentially The Reincarnation of the best parts of icos and the best parts of nfts put together and it's what you now have compared to nfts is you now have 100,000 or more people uh effectively promoting a single liquid token and I'm sure you can do the math and you can see how much more effective and efficient that is right so instead of promoting 10,000 different and illiquid floor priz jpegs you now

have an entire Army of skidos promoting uh just a singular token and doesn't matter if you're rich or doesn't matter if you're poor you can be the richest person in the world or the poorest person in the world you can participate in this and that is just gonna make the parabola so much bigger than even Crypt punks or board AP clu and we've seen this we've seen this in 2021 uh you've seen how much higher shib or Doge went compared to like the top three nft Collections and I think we're going to go even crazier this time around so at their core in terms of like what they actually are they're tokenized communities but from a financial and

liquidity perspectives meme coins are much better they're they're much better and it's not it's not even by Design it's emergent what's happening is the DG at crypto Twitter they're constantly experimenting with new asset creation new Dynamics creation new liquidity creation and we've sort of like a like a swarm of bees and birds we have emergently arrived at the idea that uh Capital wants to go into things that are easiest to pump and m coins are much easier to pump than nfts I uh yeah I think that uh there's a lot of validity to that particular idea definitely just the um you know the unit price alone I think makes it very

prohibitive for people to get into nft these days final question for you on this do you what where do you bucket like Doge and Litecoin and that era of of coins because they you know something that's funny that doesn't really happen in cryptos Chains never really die you know they they have their initial runup um and then you know maybe they never really reach their you know previous all-time Highs but they kind of pump like lower like slightly lower lower each successive cycle they still have you know in the case of Litecoin and like eth classic and things like that like billion dollar valuations um Dogecoin obviously has a much higher valuation than that so I would just be curious like where do you bucket these like old coins which kind of mean

something kind of don't kind of just our liquidity sponges sort of just get traded you know what are those assets um so not Financial advice but I strongly recommend people to not touch anything old um there are extremely few examples of coins that have repeatedly made new highs uh over more than two cycles um so the odds are stacked against you um I don't even think Litecoin is going to make new highs um Dogecoin maybe barely but that's still what like a 4X from here 5x um if you study past Cycles the

things that go up the most is always new things that's for first thing second of all um new things are essentially going into price Discovery without any quote unquote back holders without any resistance with without any sell orders in the order books quite to the extent that the old like Litecoin barely made a new high last year uh last cycle and collapsed um Dogecoin yeah it did make new highs three Cycles in a row but I think first of all from a medic perspective uh the actual doge meme itself peaked in 2012 or so maybe 2018 or whatever in terms of like actual

frequency of usage uh I think Elon Musk pumping it really hard in January February 2021 overcooked the trade a little bit in uh Trader parland and so he's been mentioning Doge a bunch of times in the last two weeks but those like barely pumps like it's it doesn't work anymore you know and um he called his government task force do was like Department of government excess you know if he was if Trump gets elected he's gonna appoint Elon to be head of this apartment it literally spells Doge and Doge didn't move yeah yeah exactly and here's the thing you need crazier stuff than do that's just the way it work because

because there's so much more money in the system than there was in 2020 the world demands like more skido assets the world demands crazier things that's just the nature of the that's just the nature of the monetary and the social system and the social social cultural Zid gist it needs something Beyond Doge it needs something crazy so you got to be on the lookout for new things and like crazier things with a stronger message because uh just like a tokenized animal I think it has certain limits you know and you need something that fills people's hearts with much greater fire you know I agree man um marad this has

been a fascinating episode man I really appreciate you coming on and uh and talking to us uh if if folks want to like find out more about you follow you on Twitter I don't know what's the best way for them to do that yeah I'm on Twitter at mop Morad uh so yeah I I pretty much tweet about memes like six seven times a day uh you're welcome to read more of my thoughts there awesome marad this has been uh really interesting man thank you so much for for coming on for sure thank you for having me hey everyone hope you all enjoyed today's episode wanted to give a final shout out to namada again a team that is near and dear to my heart they are building the shielded asset Hub which is protecting the future multichain talked a little bit about how that works in the mid roll but for now

what I would highly recommend that you do is go check them out they're in their main net launch phades you can follow along with everything at n.net you can start rewarding Yourself by shielding your actions and strengthening data privacy for all across the multichain so thanks again to MA for all the great work that you're doing