Why 2025 Is the Year of Memecoins - Murad Mahmudov

now what you're seeing there's like 50 to 100 people that essentially went from being poor to being Millionaires and now they've quit their jobs and become full-time evangelists and and growth hackers for C you see how powerful that is right and essentially um it's all about community and so you have to first the first step you need to do is you need to take those millions of mean coins and identify Cults like I said in my personal opinion there's like 25 of them right now so you need to identify these Cults how do I identify

Cults it's very simple first things first web offers a brand new pach Tre dish our job is to buy Great Tech at great prices AI is also libertarian right enable a use case that people haven't been able to do today the next hundreds of millions of players they will come to the market through mobile my personal reason why I could be bullish in the next 12 months is lench is not a licensed financial adviser and is purely for informational and entertainment purposes only all opinions and personal and the show may discuss assets that the host

or guests have positions in or maybe actively buying or selling all Investments carry risk so consult with a financial professional before making any investment decisions hey everybody welcome back to another episode of The Block runch podcast I'm your host Jason Choy I'm also the co-founder of tangent a prop shop where we invest in founder driven Venture bets and thesis driven liquid bets in the crypto markets now as someone who is mostly in it for the tech and partly in it for the fun and believe in using crypto as a way to change the world I've

had my reservations about mem coins right at first I saw them as nothing more than pure speculation but I also saw their ability to command attention like no other which is why I invested in memeland which is a project by the founder of nine gek one of the first and biggest meme sites in the world uh R Chan who wanted to use this community around a mcoin to distribute real defy and social 5 products now this investment was made before the mcoin Mania of 2023 and I got a lot of flack from VC and Traders

on Twitter when I announced my personal investment at that time now interestingly most of these Traders are now Shilling newer mem coins but that's besides the point now except for the mem investment I've not really considered memec coins as anything besides a trade but over time I saw that one of the most profitable apps that came in the past year or so for crypto was actually a meme coin Launchpad called pump. Fun which we talk about on a Roundtable series multiple times so I began to dig deeper and deeper into what memecoins actually are so

to me in a way memecoins are almost emblematic of what some investors would call Financial nihilism which is this recognition or belief that with the rising cost of living and worsening Outlook younger Generations can no longer aspire to the same quality of living that past Generations could by taking on normal 9-to-5s and they're encouraged to take on massive risk or take hail marry bets to really Ascend their social ladders so some of these people would do startups others would trade crypto so someone even say that crypto as a whole is a symptom of this financial

nihilism now others who are in crypto would say that by outlawing icos back in 2018 now retails can actually no longer invest in promising new technologies alongside accredited investor s and Angels like myself or large VC funds which forc them to invest in Fairly launched mem coins to the disc all of this the social implications and the financial implications of mem coins my next guest today is Murad who goes by must stop Murad on Twitter now morat is a Princeton graduate who worked in finance before starting his fund adaptive capital in 2019 which mostly focused

on Bitcoin now subsequently he closed the fun in 2020 and he has built a bigger following for his commentary on Meme coins now most interesting to me about Murat is that he has a Buy and Hold philosophy on Meme coins and a very philosophical take on the entire vertical which differs from a lot of the meme coin trading commentary that I don't find particularly interesting for the show so in this episode in the first half we're going to discuss morat's philosophical view on mcoins where it comes from what is emblematic of now I did disagree

with quite a few points that he made and I did push back on some of them but I kept my interjections to a minimum to let listeners decide for themselves now in the second half we dive into Moran investment framework for meme coins and finally we dive into mad's favorite meme communities and while mad does name a few meme coins do not I I repeat do not use this podcast as Financial advice because neither of us are financial advisers this entire podcast is purely for educational purposes only so without further Ado let's talk mem coins

so R I know you've been in a space for a while I've actually listened to a few of your podcasts dating way back I think in 2018 2019 we were talking about this before we started recording as well and uh I was looking at up your senior thesis in 2017 where you wrote about uh the debt crisis in China as well so uh I think you're a crypto guy through and through so walk me through the Journey of how you kind of started looking into Bitcoin investing in Bitcoin and how that led you to your

current thesis uh with the memec coin super cycle yeah so um I was in China in 2013 uh and I had an American friend there who was uh without naming specific names he was employee number four and the first foreign employee of what is currently I think the second or the third biggest uh centralized Exchange in the world um and back then it was literally just four guys in a room so I was kind of like uh at the right place at the right time and that's how I got my earli sort of Bitcoin knowledge

Bitcoin exposure and uh to tell you the truth you know it was during that bubble in uh like 2013 2014 um only got a couple of coins for myself but um once 2016 2017 rolled around and ethereum was sort of having its rise icos were having its rise I sort of um started spending more and more time in crypto and ever since then I've been doing a bunch of different things obviously a lot of personal investing a lot of um personal trading um a lot of reading a lot of writing um was doing a lot

of onchain analytics back in the day for uh BTC now I'm doing a lot of sort of onchain analytics where appropriate for meme coins um it since since they like don't have a software product of their own you do need to sort of go deeper into sort of the tokenomics and the distribution and the flows um because that's like one of the few variables that you can track um uh and in general um besides that I also had a hedge fund in 2019 2020 uh more recently I've been building uh stfx which is a defi

social protocol but on the personal side I've been sort of investing studying um meme coins like for the past eight to nine months more more actively and just been trying to share My Views sort of with the world and my Twitter following before I get started I'm grateful for Aptos for sponsoring the show and letting us continue to make this free content for all so here's Jerome from Aptos to tell us a little bit more Jerome Aptos is gaining traction of entities interested in bridging traditional Finance with defi some notable developments are Ono finances integration

of eptos which brings institutional great finance onchain and ecosystem project Aptos laps becoming a strategic investor in securitize which is an rwa platform offering tokenized fund Investments so can you explain why Aptos is such an attractive Network for onboarding web 2 financial markets and services so Aptos is the world's fastest most reliable interoperable Leo one blockchain making it the fastest most accessible payment real vulnerable for quick contacts Visa processes 1,600 transactions per second after supports 30,000 transactions per second that's 18 times faster than visa and Fs instantaneous to uses for this reason appos isn't just

the blockchain fit to bring RWS on chain it is the blockchain for Bridging the trefi defi in addition to Ono and securitize developments OS laps in collaboration with brev Howard BCG SK Telecom and Microsoft announced after the send a seed of blockchain based tools and features on the Aptos blockchain designed to meet the requirements of financial institutions while at the same time leveraging the openness scalability security speed and reliability of the public OS network atos asend will provide a web three path for any major Bank of financial institution in the world to begin offering digal

asset and Asset Management Services to the clients responsibility and their skill it represents a massive step forward in Bridging the Gap between trf and defi Innovation with the industry's key stakeholders this opportunity to brid the institutional we 3 in the name of open finance is huge is global and it's playing out at AOS thanks to the speed with our low time to finality our reliability 99.99% up time and cost efficiency with 100 times lower guas fees than other prominent LS thanks Dr now back to the episode yeah I think it's really interesting because I remember

following your journey in 2019 when you were running adaptive capital and sharing a lot of onchain analytics about Bitcoin which at that time I don't think a lot of people were even using a combination of onchain and offchain data so that was quite interesting um and I remember back then you talked a lot about sound money the thesis for Bitcoin and so obviously the the mcoin super cycle is quite a different thing so walk us through the logic of you know how did you go from hey sound money is probably the biggest use cases in

crypto to hey memecoins is actually the thing we should be paying attention to yeah so that's a great question um a really good analogy I like to make and something that I'm sure you've heard about is Horseshoe Theory horseshoe theory is this concept in politics that um you know traditionally for example uh the the far left and the far right were at the polar opposite ends of the political Spectrum but if you actually like look closely they're more similar than they are different uh and that's why people came up with the Horseshoe Theory saying that

it's actually like the centrists on the in the middle and the far left and the far right are actually touching each other so they're much more similar than they are different um obviously BTC is trying to be the Neo gold so it's trying to be the money of the future uh while mem coins are something else entirely right A lot of people ask me how do you value meme coins because they're obviously not Equity they're obviously not debt they're obvious they're kind of different to Tech alss as well in some ways um and I don't

think they are a currency either although some people have tried to analyze them as a social currency I don't think they're a currency either uh the way I see them is they're essentially a tokenized vessel of faith and more specifically I think they are Financial vessels that are absorbing different kinds of dissatisfaction uh both within crypto but also with the World At Large and we can kind of uh dig into that deeper in a few minutes um but the one thing that BTC and uh mem coins at least the best meme coins in my opinion

have in common is that almost like religious-like feel right it's that hardcore Community it's that cult-like uh organization structure um and I I I think you would agree with me that BTC um is extremely culty right many blogs and many sort of theorists have even described BTC as a sort of a a Neo religion right Satoshi is kind of like the Messiah right and um I always tell people that the best meme coins are actually going to be the ones that are like Bitcoin like um whether it's their message or it's their culture or it's

the hodlers or it's like the community or it's like the memes like the more similar it is to BTC um the higher the mecoin will go because BTC is other than the fact that it has a thetic component of its own it is the original cult in crypto right and and it has perfected that sort of formula and so um that's why I I draw parallels between these two things and I jokingly say that like the thousands of blogs by Bitcoin maximalists that we've all I'm sure done in 2017 2018 2019 um for me at

least that was perfect preparation because the way I see it is For Better or Worse right um Bitcoin is talk about sort of like the 1880s as like the the Glorious time label Epoch Paris London when the gold standard was at its greatest extent and if hyperbitcoinization happens in the future in the coming decades I do think we will see a Resurgence of that kind of uh culture and that kind of time uh d by deflationary money but um I suspect that before things get better they quote unquote get worse and so I think we're

going to see like viar or early viar before we see um hyperbitcoinization right because I do think that the governments around the world for the for the for next 10 15 years they're going to continue Printing and then we sort of have to get into a discussion of how does um inflation affect the average or the the Baseline aggregate level of anxiety in people and then that anxiety sort of affects people at like the biochemical level and then that sort of drives Collective investor behavior and essentially um and this is what I've been talking about

in my presentations and in a lot of podcasts this is by no means a controversial idea but if you look at the past cycles and this cycle essentially what you're seeing is the core narrative or the core altcoin themes the core altcoin categories that are dominating they almost have to get crazier right they they almost have to in 2017 you almost saw like a vanilla sort of okay blockchain the world is discovering blockchain we have these like icos we have these like um technology projects we're going to be using blockchain for this blockchain for that

I'm sure you remember that then uh 2021 I would argue uh started off with defi but kind of gotten crazier with like quote unquote metaverse nfts um gamei and then towards the tail end of 2021 a lot of Flatout panomics right like M time Wonderland Luna Etc right now the core themes of this cycle um it's mem coins which I would argue sort of take that Trend even further and to some extent AI uh I mean side note personally like we jokingly refer to AI coins as meme coins for midwidth um but but but but

the theme but the theme persists right and I think because there's more money in the system because there's more inequality in the system um and because people are sort of like pushed and and the opportunities especially for Zoomers right um let alone for Generation Alpha it's going to be crazier right fundamentally you have to understand the following idea in the 1950s in the western world like right or frankly anywhere in the world um our grandfathers our great-grandfathers they could have like relatively modest jobs and somehow still afford a house somehow still afford like a three

four kids and so on and so forth right obviously today that is a pipe dream right we can say that oh it's because of like offshoring globalization onshore Etc but I'm sure you would agree that a big part of this has to do with like the nature of money the nature of the financial system and how like real estate and the stock market the bond market they all get monetized to a greater extent than they have to be and so Zoomers are in a like Zoomers genuinely their life is harder than people in the 1960s

people in the 1970s I think you can deny that right and so these are some of the reasons and there's many more why people are essentially being pushed into the quote unquote Hail Mary plays and that's why people are getting pushed to these uh to these things now that's kind of one way of looking at it the other way of looking at it is sort of uh and uh the reason I wanted to come on this podcast is because I know you run a sort of a prop VC firm right and so you know in

in the 2000s and the 2010s sort of the Venture Capital industry and Silicon Valley as a whole uh became a really like a bigger and bigger part of the American economy and and a big reason for that is because you essentially saw a transition from like physical companies and physical corporations where you needed brick and mortar stores factories Logistics and all of that right and software was very attractive to find like Venture scale returns because since you since like you know Airbnb doesn't have any homes that they own Uber doesn't technically own any cars and

so because it's purely software um if you do find product Market fit um that software can essentially like conquer the world very rapidly right and that can give you those 100x THX type returns in a relatively short period of time compared to like industrial businesses right now I think what's happening here and as crazy as that sounds I think and and by the way like paradoxically obviously all of this is driven by the rapidly uh growing money supply around the world right but what I think is Happening Here Is MeMe coins they are essentially post

software they take this uh like if if in Silicon Valley unicorns you had like the equity and then you had like the software platform with its metrics mean coins essentially strip away the platform strip away the metrics and they essentially just keep the asset um because if software could uh conquer the world very fast um you still needed like sales desks you still needed to find product Market fit you still needed people to download some app or whatever right but here um meme coins because they're based on memes they can conquer the world even a

100 times faster than software and so essentially it's it's like hyper accelerationist in a way it's late capitalism stuff right they um take that to the next level where it's post software and now you just have the asset itself and essentially you have these communities that are built uh around this asset now my thesis and some people sort of think it's a bit controversial but my thesis is that 99.99% of altcoins that have ever existed in crypto uh since 20 4 they've all been meem coins all along and it's all been mimetic all along right

I'm sure you understand right even the current crop of uh VC darling alts that have been getting listed on tier one exchanges at 10 to20 billion valuations I mean if you dig deep and try to do any kind of discount cash flow analysis you know like they they they have $5,000 $6,000 in Daily fees weekly fees whatever that doesn't justify the their 20 20 billion valuations I want to jump in here real quick first um because that there's a lot to unpack with the fundamentals for so so-called Tech alts which are alts with products behind

so going back to your initial point about the Horseshoe Theory which is Bitcoin is this asset that is almost exporting an ideology and that ideology is very easy to understand for people in this space it's like the cipher Punk ideology of like self- sovereignty uh sound money a a kind of immutable monetary Supply um and then on the other side from what you're describing it sounds like the ideology that is is being exported the cult that is being built around for m coins is almost like a sense of financial nihilism it's like everything is kind

of screwed for Gen Z so let's gamble on these things knowing that there's kind of no product behind that is is that the kind of ideology that people are rallying behind and or is there something else there I think that's like one of the three four core factors um but you kind of have to dig a little bit deeper into the mem coin space and essentially uh what platforms like pump fun which allow pretty much anybody in the world to create a mcoin with one click um what they're doing is they are accelerating and I

think this like this these next few sentences is something that VCS Miss I think and something that they need to understand and this is the most important part pump fun accelerates the splitting of the mcoin asset class into two distinct categories one is the hyper gambling and the extreme nihilism that you've mentioned uh which is um it's essentially like slot machine uh let me figure out how I can quickly turn 10 salana into 50 salana uh it's like pump fun stuff it's like very fastpaced it like up and down a lot of rugs uh just

try to snipe try to bundle try to C catch a quick pump and then forget about it and it it goes on and on right and if there's 5,000 of these happening today in six months there's going to be like 500,000 of these happening per day right so the rate of mean coin production per day is going to grow and that's an important variable to understand now right now on the other hand you have and in my opinion I think there's like right now like 20 to 25 of these you have what we call PVE

coins and these are emerging communities for a lack of a better word they're trying to build the next Doge they're genuinely want to figure out a way to achieve 30 billion 50 billion even hundred billion dollar valuations um a lot of them naturally and emergently they um they evangelize the philosophy of holding philosophy of DCA and philosophy of like holding only like one to three of these hardcore PVE meme coins um instead of gambling every day right stop trading and believe in something is is how we describe it and essentially these are what we call

Cults and I think right now there's like 20 to 25 of them right and what I'm recommending not Financial advice of course but what I'm commending to all of my friends and people who message me and people who come to me is fig like it doesn't matter if there's a billion meme coins or even a trillion meme coins at the end of the day right now there's like 20 to 30 Cults now my theory for the future of mem coins is within those 20 and 30 Cults maybe 10 will become like brands or like some

kind of like a lifestyle thing right and then within those 10 you're you're going to have like three or four that what I call are movement coins Mission coins right and by the way I have a lot of theories about like the me coin space but this also has to do with one of my prediction is we're going to see a transition from animal coins to non-animal coins second theory of mine is that we're going to see a transition from jokes like because you know mcoin started as a joke right if you tell a random

uh like crypto person or a random retail person what the word mcoin they think like a it's a picture of a dog right a picture of a cat but it you know as I'm sure you you're a student of History you're a student of technological cycle speculation Cycles you know huge things or things that end up becoming huge they often start off as a toy they often start off as some Childish thing some joke right and I think meme coins are actually going to grow far beyond the Doge Vision we we call this the post

Doge movement right and personally I'm attracted to coins that are far more interesting far more inspiring far more serious than just another animal coin I want to find something that can become like a global ideology like you said a global movement a global philosophy because at the end of the day what's going on is the mem coins that will win are those that trigger the most amount of free cult labor in their holders right and what we call free cult labor is essentially Within These mean coins we have holders some of them are software Engineers

some of them are marketers some of them are like obviously crypto Twitter large accounts and what they would usually charge external companies like 20,000 $30,000 Worth to do because they are holding these mem coins um and Beyond the financial incentive because they're spiritually and philosophically aligned with them they are motivated to perform or to take action for the sake of the mean coin right and that's why I say and this is crazy by the way I think mecoin Cults are going to achieve the Dao Vision even though they don't have a treasury right so you

know the Dao dream the network State dream that people have been talking about since 2018 right um the reason is and a lot of these daos they have massive treasuries like 100 million even a billion dollars right mcoins have very small treasuries a lot of them don't even have zero right but yet I think they're going to grow bigger than the doos and they're actually going to come closer to the organizational Doo dream why because belief is much more powerful than even monetary incentive and uh like yield in like you know X to earn and

all of that right do we come full circle with that if if we launch mem coins and we use mcoins as a distribution channel to you know cultivate this Cod labor to build real products then do these memec coins then become the tech alts that you talked about which is extremely overvalued a lot of them maybe some usage because we actually saw examples of this I think Sheba uh tried to do like layer two and then obviously mem land uh they're trying to do like social five products and it seems like the attention is rarely

on the products they built but more just so on the price and the token itself yeah so um it's a it's a really good question um if you and you're right we're seeing this with flocky trying to build like a bunch of uh like actual products we're seeing this with Sheba trying to build a bunch of products my opinion on this is the following right and I'm going to make a couple of points here I think utility quote unquote it's good for Bare markets but it's bad for bull markets because you because utility revenue it

creates a floor but it also creates a ceiling and if you look at uh shib and flocky it's specifically in the recent bare Market uh that they have tried to create this utility because you know in a bare Market sentiment is really bad everybody think that crypto is over uh everybody think that the super cycle is over and so um they are almost like pushed um subconsciously to create some kind of products so that they can kind of keep rolling out news keep rolling out announcements because obviously the money the money's dried up so they

need to essentially like self-generate attention right personally I think we right now in the middle of a bull market and if this cycle is anywhere even remotely similar to previous Cycles we still probably have like 12 to 14 months to go in my opinion right and if if we are correct about that then I actually don't think that utility is bullish because you know let's be real with utility comes responsibility metrics kpis users you know how many products in crypto what What proportion of crypto products that have ever existed actually have product Market fit 0.001%

right and um I actually think that in this current zist in this current juncture I don't want mean coins to have utility per se because you know if you look at an altcoin um you can actually like break it into like factors or I should rather say Premia right and for every altcoin the actual like fundamental utility it is probability times like mathematically speaking right it's probability times magnitude of future dividend to token holders right and you know historically most of the time that has not led to anything uh but still even for the even

for the most profound Tech Al the valuation driver for the token it's still 70 80 90% like narrative driven mimetic driven speculative driven right now the key difference that I'm trying to communicate to people is that the mean coin utility it's not zero right a lot of VCS that are KN deep in tech alts tech safs like VC Investments they try to handwave meme coins away as pure brain rot and pure degeneracy but I don't think they are and in fact I actually think that altcoins and mean coins they are the same thing because for

altcoins um you have the product itself you have the community and you have the token and I think the rise of mem coins uh that you're seeing this year it's essentially even retail is finally catching up to the idea that this crypto industry um the core product is the token right the core product is not software because if you talk to anybody on the street and you know for the VC model to make sense they ultimately do need to end end up dumping on retail they ultimately do need for those parabas that we've seen in

2017 and 2021 um you do need retail because those are the people who create those parabas right towards the tail end of the cycle and if you actually talk to them at the micro level like do they care about any of the latest crypto Innovations like do they care about cryptography do they care about decentralization do they even care about technology I don't think they do I think what they care about is to make some money um maybe to have fun maybe to find Community right and what I'm trying to say is even if the

mean coin valuation is 90% mimetic and speculative and narrative driven just like in Al there is a utility component there that's not zero and that sort of boils I don't want to I don't want to talk for too long but that sort of boils down into my whole movement thesis Neo religion thesis it's essentially people trying to find each other you know um like religion is kind of like on the decline especially in the developed world and suffer like mental suffering right people aren't getting physically killed anymore like at least in the west but now

as moving higher up the maslo Pyramid of needs uh there's other sort of gaps uh and they have to do with like spirituality they have to do with human connection and I think what you're seeing is you know a lot of software as a service Platforms in Silicon Valley they are B2B so busines to business or they are a businesses to Consumer right I think the correct way to analyze meme coins is as ctoc platforms so they're essentially these like super early Mini uh daos super early mini uh Network States and I think those that

trigger the most the highest levels of inspiration per capita uh within their holders uh they are the ones that are going to win and you know we've already seen with Doge and with Pepe and with whiff and with shib and a couple of others that these things can go to like 20 30 even 90 billion right so you already have evidence that it's not software is not what drives these things it's attention it's wanting to be a part of a group and it's actually like the the tokenomics more than the actual soft no one cares

about the software I think and this is a bit of a black pill but I think that um software in this entire industry of ours it's just used as a narrative technique or as a marketing technique or as sort of an announcement generation technique in order to like kind of like draw eyeballs to things right because let's be real the best products in crypto are functioning well right now without a token and ironically the best tokens they don't require a product right so the again the best products don't require a token and the best tokens

don't require a product and so there's actually a separation happening right now and people are starting to see this the technology side of crypto is one thing and the token site of crypto is another thing and most of the time it's not even connected so the things that create actual product Market fit at the software level that's a whole separate like side of the industry that's that's different things and the things that make tokens go 100x th000 X that's a whole different side of it and a lot of the times they are completely different sets

of reasons yeah I think that the thing that you mentioned last was actually something that I've been thinking a lot about because the trader in me sees your point right a lot of the VC backed uh tokens they are listing evaluations that are uh don't leave much room for imagination for the marginal buys for retail so as a Trader uh I see a lot of opportunities in trading the meme coins uh but as a VC I can see that um you know there is still the case to be made that perhaps the lack of interest

in product is because we haven't really found product Market fit for most of the products besides stable coins and speculation but that is itself not a reason to stop funding the developers and just divert all capital towards beam points so I always kind of find these two parts of myself at coms like okay I think I should fund more experiments to try to hit product Market fit but at the same time it's clear that some of the best return assets have been meme coins and you know as a Trader you know purely profit maxing side

um that is something that we should pay attention to so I'm very curious because uh your initial foray into crypto is very kind of ideological driven uh driven by kind of the cyer punk sound money thesis which we talked a lot about um and then this mean coin thesis almost seem a little bit kind of nihilistic in that sense so how do you reconcile the hey let's make the world a better place with uh with Bitcoin with sound money versus hey let's try to you know play this uh play this kind of meme coin game

yeah so so I think the same forces that are driving the rise of BTC are the same forces that are driving the rise of mcoins um at this point so first of all Meco uh before before I delve further BTC is trading uh at roughly over 1 trillion right now and I still believe that on a longterm time scales like 20 30 years it's going to go to like 200 trillion um and essentially become like the de facto Global money so I still think uh BTC has um on long time scales like 200x more to

go that being said because of the way uh most people's lives are structured they're naturally mentally and psychologically looking at how they can make money like this quarter how they can make money this year at least how they can make they're not thinking in 20e time frames they're thinking in one year time frame at most and most people even shorter and a lot of people people know that at least in terms of medium-term returns BTC at this stage is kind of like it's it's the billionaires who are starting to be interested in it it's the

Sovereign wealth funds that are starting to look at it right uh but you know let's say that this cycle is going to be similar to past cycles and let's assume that BTC is going to go to like 150k or what or whatever right that 23x that BTC still has in the tank at least for this cycle um reach they know that this 2 or 3x it's not going to change their life so as per usual and as in the last Cycles um they're looking for Alternatives right they're looking for sort of alternative cryptocurrencies alternative crypto

assets um in past Cycles it was like Tech alss of various kinds but the problem is and here's what you guys need to understand is it's I don't really care about mem coin versus techcoin what actually matters is the community and I actually think Tech coins have started uh back in the day in a very beautiful way uh because in 2016 2017 um you as like a let's say an average middle class person you could get into an Ico early at very reasonable valuations and then you could ride that wave to like multi-billion dollar valuations

and many people have and that's why altcoins became popular in the first place because people heard that their cousin has essentially made a fortune by investing like chain link or whatever right now the problem and this has been a big problem in my opinion since 2021 especially in 2022 2023 um it's those games have now been relegated to the private rounds right like preed seed series a series B I'm sure as a VC you you know what I'm talking about and I think the sing there there's many steps to describe here and how this is

all happening and I've talked about this a lot on my Twitter as well but I think the single most cruel component here is when altcoin Tech Founders uh they I think this is my opinion right they deliberately list at very high valuations I think it is premeditated I think it is systematic and I think it is done deliberately because people think okay we're going to list something it's probably going to Goga 70 80% no matter what so we might as well list list as high as we possibly can so that when that negative 80% after

listing inevitably happens that floor is higher than what it would have been right right and so crypto alts have initially started as Community Building Enterprises but now they've become industrialized behind the scenes to such a great extent where people aren't even pretending that it's uh that it's not about extracting retail liquidity anymore and I think it's kind of messed up when you launch sort of these uh infrastructure altcoins at$ 20 billion valuations that have no users that have no revenue and then obviously a lot of retail around the world they're going to be even bidding

these things on the way down and essentially as we're seeing it's like VC's team whoever is getting unlocked or whatever for of sort of staking rewards that they're getting they're just dumping on that so essentially what VCS have been doing for the past 10 years they're using blockchain rails to engage in IQ Arbitrage right these San Francisco people New York people whatever with 120 IQ right they're effectively intellectually exploiting people around the world with 0 IQ and they are essentially make they're extracting wealth from like poorer and Dumber people um and it's a dishonest game

because like re there's no way for retail to win here right have you heard of a how many stories have you heard this cycle of people making it from Tech Al very few I think a big part of this is also regulations as well because I'm always a strong proponent of icos I think they were exploited by scammers to to actually take advantage of people so they were regulated away but I think when we got rid of icos a big part of how Capital formation is stunn in the space is gone and you know that

the retail investors are almost protected from the opportunities to invest in actual Tech alts at early valuations that's why they kind of forced to play this mem coin game which is almost like you can almost trace the logic directly back to when icos were banned and the meme coins started taking off but I know we can go on and on on the thesis part but I really want to focus on the Tactical part as well because this is something that I think most people are very foreign to you mentioned a few Frameworks that you develop

like slot machines versus PVE coins animal to non-animal coins Joe coins to Mission coins I think even having the characterization is very interesting to me so can you walk us through your process in underwriting meme coins like when you look at a meme coin what is the first thing you look at what are the valuation you look at and what are the you know kpis if there are any to to kind of track for a mcoin yeah so I've realized I pretty much made peace immediately with the fact that there's going to be like quadrillions

of mcoins and my view is that we're going to see something that we jokingly refer to as mem coin accelerationism essentially I think next year you're pretty much going to uh see uh literally a meme coin for every uh word concept meme number Color Country City person and just even a combination of numbers and letters right so you have to like you have to take this thought experiment and uh take it to its logical extreme let's say on one hand we have 10 quadrillion me coins that literally represent every little thing in the world and

then on the other end of the spectrum let's say there's a global government and we've given every single person in the world $1,000 uh so now putting these two things together in that context which things are going to do well right which things and ultimately it boils down to which things are going to achieve critical mass so first we need to Define what critical mass is for the sake of Simplicity let's say a critical mass just for the sake of Simplicity right not to go into too much detail uh let's say critical mass is reaching

$1 billion valuation right because just as an example once you have 1 billion you probably have Mo most of the sex listings already unlocked SL on the way you have custodians kind of adopting it now trafy and and n VCS can even start dabbling into it and that now that one billion can go to 10 billion or even more right uh on the other hand if you don't reach critical mass um you are probably at at best you're probably going to like pump to 300 million and then slowly bleed to obscurity and that's what you're

seeing in most cases right now you have to ask yourself which things out of this quadrillion m coins are going to achieve critical mass and this is why I keep sort of um talking about cults over and over again because um when you have an extremely culty community and by the way this is not this is not unique to meme coins we've seen this already with cardano we've seen this already with chain link uh we've seen this with ripple obviously we've been obviously we've been seeing this to some extent with BTC eth and soul and

there's a few other examples and by the way just to briefly return to your previous Point uh I really like the project to um even though I'm not super deep into like even though I'm not a big believer in crypto xai uh but what I really like is they have enabled the prize Discovery for their project to start super super early so now what you're seeing there's like 50 to 100 people that essentially went from being poor to being Millionaires and now they've quit their jobs and become full-time evangelists and and growth hackers for to

you see how powerful that is right and essentially um it's all about community and so you have to first the first step you need to do is you need to take those millions of in coins and identify Cults like I said in my personal opinion there's like 25 of them right now so you need to identify these Cults how do I identify Cults it's very simple first things first I don't buy new launches I only look at things that have been out there for at least six months so that immediately cuts that immediately cuts off

a lot of like the long tail uh because the way I see it is the actual process of cult building it's like a plane that needs a landing strip before it takes off and you need to battle test the community and the reason for that is because um if you have a long sideways period where the coin is like trading under 20 million under 10 million um then what ends up happening is you give a sufficient amount of time for the token Supply to go from impatient people to Patient people and from traders to Believers

and from essentially like people who don't see the vision to people who generally see this thing going to billions right and so uh after those eight months period you have a lot of Supply concentrated in the hands of like literally crazy Believers in a good sense of the word and these guys once this starts going like they're not going to sell at a $3 billion valuation they're probably not even going to sell a$ 20 billion valuation and it's at the end of the day it's people not selling um that is going to drive these things

to like ridiculous valuations and um so first of all I want it to be at least six months old because I think calling anything a cult that hasn't been around for at least six months is ridiculous second of all and this is probably even more important I want to see two or even three 70% or more drops right and with all of the coins that are all of the mean coins that are winning right now they've undergone six or even seven of these drops um because what ends up happening is you battle test the community

and if it starts curling back upwards it means that it has essentially survived right it has managed to generate enough attention and belief whether it's crypto Twitter or Tik Tok or anywhere else to sort of um have the disbelief Believers leave and new Believers join right so that's the second thing third thing and this is a bit more uh quantitative but essentially you study the chain um and I've been tweeting about these things like different kinds of metrics of holder equality ratios of poor holders to Rich holders how decentralized it is um different sort of

like Genie coefficients hhi coefficients to see like to to make sure that it's not quote unquote cabal right and by the way you're going to see so many more cabal coins and VC mean coins launch I think it's all [ __ ] uh I recommend everybody again not Financial advice but I recommend everybody to invest in things that are as organic as possible as bottom up as possible as decentralized as possible as distributed as possible right now moving on to the more subjective things this is what people refer to as Vibes and this is just

essentially this is harder to quantify but this is your personal view or your personal emotional resonation and you with the meme with the idea and with the people at the end of the day you're actually not investing in memes you're investing in people investing in groups of people so you want to figure out who the biggest holders are you want to figure out who the biggest supporters on social media are you want to figure out like what are they doing behind the scenes what kind of marketing growth listing uh stunts they're trying to pull and

um obviously you want to look at the memes themselves Right video memes pictures and you just kind of want to put yourself in the uh shoes of what you think the average SL agregate sort of future retail investor is or even future Institutional Investor is and to see whether it's going to resonate with them right so that's kind of a rough overview I'd love to kind of Tak into the false positives there then because obviously there's like the what I consider Blue Chip memes I don't know if you refer to them as the same name

but like Doge I think it's like 17 18 billion Sheba 10 billion I think there's seven meme coins above a billion dollars according to coin Geto but then hundreds of thousands of them below that uh you know anywhere from a few hundred, to a few hundred million so what is the difference between the meme coins that make it past a million threshold and the ones that hit all the check marks that you mentioned let's say they have a decent geny coefficient they've had you know been battle tested in terms of the price they have good

memes but they still don't make it to that blue chip like what what is what are they usually not doing right yeah so good question um more generally I think um a lot of people are buying large caps right now and that makes total sense because I think that the quote unquote Blue Chips uh at each Respec of chain um in 2025 they will Pro like with will probably outperform soul in my opinion right or um Pepe will probably outperform ethereum in my opinion uh if we if we enter into this like secular bull phase

right um so it makes sense and then that's on one side on the Other Extreme you have people that are buying sort of like more on the quote unquote DJ and gambling side and they're trying to gamble on new launches pump funds like these micro caps right and I think actually neither is optimal and I've said the same thing in April of this past of this year and I'm saying the same thing again I still think the quote unquote deep value is in the midcaps I think the midcaps is like where you're going to get

the most optimal risk reward and that's personally the category that I'm focused on essentially you want to uh bet on the coin like in terms of like the best risk reward at this juncture right now um I think the best returns is going to be with things that are evolving um like from a small cap to a large cap like right on that pathway to reaching critical mass right and by the way we can all Define critical mass in our own sort of different quantitative terms right but I think you want to sort of if

it's like an sc type thing you want to be betting on things that are about to sort of start hitting that escape velocity or start approaching that critical mass so that's why I personally am focused on midcaps I've been focused on them since April and I'm still focused on them right now um in terms of false positives that you mentioned you know there have been coins that have hit a billion or almost a billion but there're still cabal coins and I think binance understands and binance coinbase and large institutions they understand that they can't really

get involved with these kinds of things because you know these cabal coins the problem is the meme coin space is started as a Counterattack against VC but if you're going to be buying or supporting cabal coins then we're just is going back to square one right it is defeating the purpose and uh essentially um you know smart people on Twitter they see the chain they see the early blocks they see when something was bundled in a really nasty way you know what I mean they see when a lot of these coins ultimately 80% of the

supply boils down to like literally five people and I think that's excuse my French kind of [ __ ] up right because the point of this whole thing is to kind of grow together and grow a calized Community that's why you have to support organic communities and ultimately you know cabal can generate attention for a week or a month but the biggest winners are those that are going to be keep capturing attention for like a year year and a half and to do that you need uh the supply to be sufficiently decentralized so that you

have sufficiently like you you what you want is you want upper middle class holders because those people um they're like the they're like the best bang for your buck in terms of the kind of attentional impact and positive imp that they can make on the community and when you say cabal coin just for those who are not familiar what does that mean it means that a very small number of people SL entities um have concentrated the a very large chunk of the supply sometimes even 60 70 80% in the hands of these like five or

six people and then they essentially go start marketing they start paying Shady KS they start paying Shady people on Tik Tok they start paying Shady people on Instagram and YouTube in order to promote this thing and then they pretend that it is similar to the actual organic meme coin right and essentially they're trying to sell you a product as if it's organic but it's actually incredibly centralized and so essentially it's the same thing as the the VC backed in for altcoins just packaged as a mem coin exactly and it's complete [ __ ] um and

I I and I don't think they're going to win uh I think they're going to lose because um the people that are on they're going to keep exposing them they're going to keep uh showing the weird onchain transactions early on they're going to keep showing like the Shady deals they're going to keep exposing people you know so um it's a losing game and instead you want to uh focus on the communities that are anti- K anti VC anti-k cabal and like I said as distributed as possible as decentralized as possible no Shady deals no weird

OTC discounts um none of that thing and you want to be aligned with like honest people that are at of course it's a spectrum right it's a spectrum like it's not black and white but you want to be leaning towards those that are like trying to be as honest as possible and what is the typical profile of a meme coin founder that you would like because obviously like you said there's a spectrum I'm sure there are guys on pump. fun that are just printing meme coins maybe they launch like a 100 every day and try

to see which takes off there are guys who might actually just launch one meme coin and and really just put all the work in c creting community there and then there are some guys that are actually product guys but they build this mem coin and try to use it as distribution right like the I think what sheiba was doing what melan was doing so what is the profile that you think is best suited to develop this type of like mcoin that becomes culturally relevant let's say it goes to like a billion dollars yeah so I

I think that's a very uh that's that's a bit of a VC coded question and the actual answer is um you actually don't want a Founder I don't think Founders are good for mean coins and I think the best meme coins in my opinion are those that like become leader list as f as possible that's why quote unquote the the the developer selling like Dev sold the the common joke right Dev sold is bullish because then um you don't have like that one person that holds a lot uh they have sold and now the community

can kind of run with it and essentially uh the more leaderless the more leaderless it is the more sort of emergent and decentralized it is the better that's my view um but to be honest with you I think um you know just like different da in defi they have different govern Styles right some more decentralized some more decentralized I think you're going to see the same thing with meme coins where some are more like sort of like founder driven or whatever or leader driven and others are like just hyper decentralized but personally I like those

that are leaderless because you get to it it feels like you're a part of a swarm like a swarm of bees or birds and um you're not like you don't really have a central point of failure as much and it's more like everybody just tries to help however they can you know and I think that's very cool and I think that's much more in line with the crypto EOS yeah and so I think that's a good segue to obviously one of the more talked about meme coins CYO is mother so for listeners at home mother

is a meme coin launched by a rapper called aelia uh they just had a big party here in token 2049 um and they were the Talk of the Town for meme coins so it almost seems to me like what nfts were to celebrities back in 2021 when all celebrities were launching their own nftd collections you know including Trump meme coins are kind of the new fat for some celebrities now what do you think of these like are these uh you know a different type of thing entirely to what you look at which is you mentioned

like more decentralized leaderless cyber kind of you know swarm um type of phenomenon or what is the general view there on Celebrity coins so I don't want to step on other people's toes but personally I'm not that bullish on CP coins and the reason for that is because um if you try to turn a human being into like a meme token um I don't think that scales globally very well and I think uh Universal Concepts that are more abstract are much more powerful because a again you don't like you don't have a essential point of

failure um you don't have like if if a Founder makes a mistake it essentially speaks badly on the entire like token uh token Supply and generally I people like people dislike people but people like ideas that's the way I see it and I think more Universal and Abstract concepts are going to do better right um second second of all I will give respect where it's due though with IG ailia she definitely has stuck around for much longer than almost every other celebrity coin like all of the all of the 500 celebrity coins that we saw

launched in uh March April and May of 2024 I mean all of those guys have already given up but she has still persisted so I'll give respect where du but um as you know um they've made an announcement that they're going to turn the mother sort of meme coin into more of a a like a casino platform which actually I think in my opinion is a testament to my thesis That Celebrity coins in and of itself are kind of bearish and that's why they're pretty much pivoting to being a utility token in a like a

casino platform right so essentially mother is pivoting away from being a pure meme into sort of like a tech Al pretty much right and but I think that actually proves proves my point you know yeah and well Mor for the final part of this I think this is the part that people would be most excited for and obviously it's not Financial advice but what are some meme communities that you are most excited about that you think actually have a shot at becoming you know mainstream culturally relevant so um again not Financial advice do your own

research but I would say the five or six coins that I am the most bullish on at the moment um first of all SPX 6900 it's a financial movement that whose goal is to flip uh the market cap of spx500 right and I know it sounds crazy and almost delusional but that level of delusion is actually extremely bullish because essentially it mimetically acts as a magnet towards sort of moving uh moving upwards and traversing as much of that distance as possible second of all a meme coin that I like a lot is giga it's based

on the gigachad meme and it also has a movement properties to sort of reclaim positive masculinity uh to be strong to be stoic and essentially it also has elements of a fitness and Lifestyle brand I'm very bullish on Giga as well other than these I also really like popcat I really like MOG um and I like uh Apu and I like Harry Potter Obama Sonic tanino so I would say these are my top six picks at the moment got it and yeah you said not Financial advice but uh I got a dick into some of

these cuz I def haven't come across definitely very different worlds but this has been really interesting to really dig into your brain um and understand your Frameworks behind this so for people who want to follow you what are the best platforms for them to do this I'm pretty much only on Twitter uh at must of Morad uh I post about me coins like three four times a day so uh feel free to uh find me there awesome yeah thank you so much for taking your time R I appreciate it thank you for having me hey

there Jason here thanks for supporting another episode of The Block crunch podcast if you enjoyed this please give us a festar r on Spotify and apple podcast and make sure you subscribe on YouTube so you can check out our founder interviews our Roundtable series on our Venture thesis as well as our on a tangent sub series about our current market views and as always you can reach out to me on X Mr Jason Choy and I'll make sure to read every comment related to this episode so I'll see you next time [Music]