Murad Mahmudov
Step aside Ansem, there's a new sheriff in town.
I have to admit that I know very little about what developments have been going on during the Year of the New Narrative 2024. Why is this? Because this narrative is not only memes... but SOLANA memes. I've been boycotting Solana since inception in 2020 because it's clearly a centralized hunk of garbage VC chain. Perhaps this was a mistake as I am quite good at gambling and could have made a pretty penny had I been paying more attention. No ragrets.
Who is Murad?
I was first exposed to this dude recently so I don't know his full history, but I'm looking into it. Rumor has it that Murad was once a lowly Bitcoin maximalist pleb like so many others before him. I have to assume that he's since leveraged his wealth to dominate this cycle's Shitcoin Casino. If there's one thing people in crypto respect it is the opinions of the person who just won the lottery. Money talks and bullshit walks!
And this money is a talking.
So I decided to watch one of his YouTube videos for this post.
We shall analyze it in real-time.
We're-all-going-to-make-it [WAGMI] is dead!
We start off with a bang in true maximalist fashion!
All these gains are going directly into my bags and no one else's, said the maxi. This is a false narrative that is gonna go completely out the window in 2025 as Bitcoin overflows above $100k and splashes liquidity into every coin under the sun. Seriously we've all been here before he should really know better than to spout some this-time-is-different nonsense. I'm quite certain that 2025 will make 2021 look like a joke pebble in the road given the current environment and socioeconomic climate.
80% of the token supply is owned by insiders
Memecoins are not a vampire attack on crypto tech, but crypto tokens.
7 min into the video the claim is made that memecoins are the solution to greedy foundations premining tokens and giving all the gains to VCs, devs, and other insiders. I feel like I shouldn't have to explain why these are all good points being made but at the same time there is a false equivalence being made that only meme-coins can accomplish this feat.
The real narrative of the 2024 cycle
It's very obvious that the real narrative here is not meme-coins at all, but rather fair-launches that seed liquidity for new tokens. This is actually very interesting and I must thank Murad for pointing it out to me in this roundabout fashion. The 2024 tech-stack does indeed build on top of the 2020 stack, which in turn was spawned from 2016. It's all coming together.
An explanation.
2016 was the ICO "revolution". Obviously most of those were failures, but it did teach us what worked and what didn't to a certain extent. In fact we might even make the argument that ICOs were the precursor to DEFI 2020, as networks like MAKERDAO and DAI lending have survived through multiple bear markets now. Now we see that these fair-launch presales further piggyback on top of the main usecase we acquired from DEFI 2020: the AMM yield farm.
By mashing these technologies together memecoins on Solana have created a viral resistance to premined bullshit and foundations giving themselves all the power. Now anyone that wants to participate in a token BEFORE it's launched can throw the governance coin into a smart contract that will be paired against the new-token in an AMM farm to create exponential levels of liquidity that allow whales to buy in size without pushing up the price too quickly. This creates even more liquidity and more opportunity for other whales to move in, and before you know it some stupid ass memecoin has gone over x1000. Most importantly nobody got an unfair advantage at any point of this process. This is what makes the current memecoin narrative so exciting for crypto degenerates.
But once again I have to point out that making this bogus claim that only shit-ass memecoins with zero usecase can do a fair-launch is complete lunacy. We HAVE TO ASSUME players like Murad are just bad actors trying to pump their own bags before the music stops and everyone gets absolutely fucked during the next bear market.
On the other side of this coin it is not Murad's fault that crypto foundations and VC funds are beyond greedy and ridiculous. It is also not his fault that the 4-year market cycle exists. Nothing stops these greedy goblins from doing a fair launch... they simply REFUSE to engage in fair launches. Why is that? Because devs are putting in full time work to give a coin "utility" and they feel as if they are ENTITLED to an unfair premine. They also require seed money to finance their own salaries (in theory). So we can see that there is a very good reason for why this habitat is the way it is at the moment.
The obvious question we need to ask here is a simple one:
What has more value?
- A premined foundation coin with "utility".
- A fair-launch memecoin with a "community".
Given this new frame of reference it's easy to agree with Murad in that the "utility" that these foundations are providing are often completely vaporware anyway, so why not just stick to memecoins and get the fair-launch? I can respect that viewpoint, but it's also pretty clear that this binary thinking of having to choose one or the other is complete bullocks. We obviously would rather have it all: community with a fair-launch and utility. Is that really so much to ask for? Apparently it is! What we see is what we get.
Catering to greed and scarcity.
It is true that the best market fit for the average crypto user is simply number-go-up. But where does that money come from? On a very real level the vast majority of this perceived wealth exists as paper gains within the market cap. The assumption that we could sell every token at the current price is a blatantly false one.
Is the legacy debt-based economy really so riddled with corruption that booting up a new memecoin has more value than the system already in place? I think we have to assume that at some point these communities need to be creating real sustainable value rather than just printing money out of thin air, but who knows. We are transitioning to an exponential age of abundance after all. At the same time if the value is coming from outside the ecosystem that very much implies that all the value is being subsidized by some other source (in this case Solana itself). My extremely educated guess is that Solana can not bear that burden in the long term. These are all flash-in-the-pan gains. Shocking, I know.
Key points in minute 8:
- Poor people need a way to make money.
- Airdrops don't build community.
- Memes are a "spiritual reincarnation of ICO 2017"
- Inflation is out of control
- AI is creating economic deflation via automation that will destroy job market.
- Wealth inequality skyrockets
- Incels are having a bad time (lack of community and satisfaction).
- Crypto is one of the few ways to escape the hypercompetitive rat-race.
"A crisis of meaning and purpose within society."
Again the points being made here a very valid and well thought out ones; Prepackaged with a very nice looking bow. The problem all boils down to the complete false equivalence of memes... as if memes are the only assets that can fill this void. Dude knows exactly what he's doing, and he's using his influence to pump his own bags; it's obvious. I still kinda like him though.
The narrative being created here is a strong one, and it's why Murad has become the leading figurehead within the shitcoin casino. All he's done here is taken the shitcoin narratives that have already been posed by others and repackaged them into the much more palatable brand that we see here. Even the shitcoiners know this and they just tend to respect the hustle regardless. Pump muh bags, Murad! Wen Moon?
9:07
And what better narrative than the bullshit you are peddling in this video and elsewhere? lol. Alright I'm just going to come out and say it: this guy is going to get absolutely wrecked in the bear market as all of his millions are trapped within a completely illiquid market with an entire army looking to frontrun him if he starts selling (which will be very easy because people are constantly doxing his wallets). I just hope this kid doesn't end up in prison somehow because I do kind of like him on a personal level even if the message is misguided. These things happen.
It is painfully transparent that the thing being cultivated here is nothing but a massive pump and dump... and it's probably going to work too. Unless of course real tokens start doing fair launches and they actually have a product people want to use. This is all very similar to the NFT era of 2021 in this respect. What goes up must come down.
Cults: the ultimate narrative
An army of obsessed schizos working to pump your bags.
This is the video I saw recently that finally forced me to take Murad seriously and look into what he is all about. This cult narrative is gaining traction very fast and is extremely accurate. But again he connects it to the false equivalence that only memes can provide this cultish security blanket.
It represents emotional safety because if it is a legitimate cult people are not selling.
Again, this is true, but does not apply to memes. We can not call anything in crypto a cult until it has survived at least one bear market. That's just the way it is. The vast majority of these "communities" claiming diehard community cult status are totally full of shit. Most will be completely blown apart during the next bear.
- Bitcoin
- Doge
- Monero
- XRP Army
- Thorchain Chads
- Link Marines
- Hive Swarm
- Solana Soldiers
These are real crypto cults that have proven themselves over multiple cycles. But just because they are cults doesn't guarantee survival or success, even if it does improve our odds. As we all know the LUNAtics where eliminated last cycle due to the UST conversion debacle. Will they ever recover? Time will tell. This topic also makes me very bullish on the Hive cult as we have all crawled through the shit together to make it here, but also the Ninjamine hangs over us even now. Solana Presales don't have that problem.
We are going to transition from funny memes to serious ones.
What he is saying here is that he believes the evolution of these communities is going to evolve to become highly political in direct opposition to the centralized empire that seeks to control the entire world. These "mission coins", as he calls them, could indeed be a thing going forward. Interesting.
Finishing the video and remaining slides of note:
This post is already much longer than anticipated.
Time for a speedrun to the end.
Yes, community is important; we got it.
Fair launch into cult community; yes you said that already.
Also liquidity and free labor from zealots.
Just looked up KOL: Key Opinion Leaders (rebranded corporate speak for "influencer")
Oh nice...
I'm glad this slide is included because I joined a super random memecoin space on Xitter yesterday and these guys were talking about PvP & PvE in relation to Murad. In any case these people were giving their comments on it and it was very clear that they didn't even know what PvE even means... which I found comical. This one guy was saying player-vs-enemy and a lot of these dudes were talking about how it's PvE in the sense that it's their community vs other communities rather than everyone in the community for themselves...
That is so not what PvE means...
PvE is synonymous with cooperation and synergy and has nothing to do with zero-sum game theory. It means player vs environment and the implication is that we ALL work together to build value and that we all benefit from the outcome. In an MMO game this is where 40 players might team up to kill a dragon, and in the real world it's where humans team up against mother nature and the laws of physics for a more prosperous future with less hardship and strife. We might not be able to fly around like a superhero at will but we can build commercial airplanes that move near the speed of sound.
I find it pretty entertaining that these degens don't even know what Murad is talking about when he says things like PvE and community cultishness. I guess they will learn the hard way.
Believe in something, bruv.
This is another very noteworthy slide because it shows how the weakening of religion in society, for better or worse, has created a void in community that crypto seeks to fill. This also brings up themes of the divide-and-conquer tactics employed by the empire with relation to American individualism and the two-party system. This is something I've been talking about for years so it's pretty clear that Murad does have some insight to give in certain respects. These insights are just all focus-fired onto memecoins for whatever reason. Flavor of the week I suppose.
AKA most of these assets will be failures...
And how to try to identify the "real ones" from "fake news".
Conclusion
I'm actually quite shocked about just how much insight I was able to extract from a short 20 minute video on memecoins. Murad has done a very good job of spinning this new narrative... no matter how bonus and ridiculous it happens to be. Many good points were made and my only argument of note is that these concepts apply to the entire space and really have nothing to do with memes specifically. Those of us that have been on Hive for a while already understand most of these concepts, but it's good to get a refresher course while getting our finger on the pulse of the Shitcoin Casino.
The most disappointing part about all of this is attempting to apply the knowledge we just learned. For example Hive might be in trouble because Hive doesn't have any momentum and still basically sits at local lows. Does that mean we shouldn't buy/hold Hive? Well it's a cult so we buy/hold Hive regardless, right?
This entire diatribe becomes hypocritical in the face of the context being presented. Murad is not telling anyone to join the cult, but rather to exploit the cult for profit. How is that better than a VC funded project? It's just all around gross optics and drowning in scarcity mindset and greed. Can we redirect course or is this just a classic case of people being people?