In a post on X on Aug. 23, crypto analyst Murad Mahmudov explained why he thought that “cult meme coins” would continue to outperform everything until the end of the market cycle.
He added that every crypto cycle has a few core narratives that dominate with Ethereum, altcoins, and ICOs for 2017, alternative layer-1s, DeFi and NFTs for 2021, and artificial intelligence, real-world assets (RWA), and meme coins for this cycle.
Meme Coins Will Make It, Says Murad
He delved into the assets that surged in previous cycles, noting that “many of those coins had a pre-pump in the pre-final year of the bull run, followed by mega-pumps in the final year of the bull run.”
He used a few examples of tokens that have exhibited this behavior, such as ETH, XMR, and XVG in the 2016-17 cycle and SOL, ADA, MANA, and CryptoPunks in the 2020-21 cycle.
He said that many in the crypto community were calling tops for meme coins, but …
“What if the spring 2024 pump we had on memes was merely the PRE-PRE-PUMP?”
1/16 Why Cult Memecoins will continue to outperform everything until the end of the Cycle
Every Crypto “Altcoin” Cycle has a few core Narratives that dominate the cycle.
2016-2017: Ethereum, Altcoins and ICOs
2020-2021: Alt-L1s, DeFi, GameFi, NFTs
2024-2025: Memes, AI, RWA pic.twitter.com/6RKPFPM42O— Murad (@MustStopMurad) August 22, 2024
The analyst made a list of the top twenty meme coins, discounting the “relics” Dogecoin, Shiba Inu, and Floki.
He then created an index noting that the market cap of this top twenty was just $8 billion. Additionally, $8 billion is “effectively nothing” in a world with over half a quadrillion in wealth, he said before predicting:
“I would not be shocked for Memes to hit $1T+.”
He concluded that earlier this year was just the first minor pump for meme coins, and they will “continue to go ballistic in the next ~15 months.”
Memecoin Market Outlook
Meme coins currently have a market cap of $41.7 billion which represents just 1.85% of the total crypto market cap, according to CoinGecko, which lists 1,728 of them.
Moreover, 57% of this meme coin market cap is just two tokens, Dogecoin and Shiba Inu, so Murad has a point in that there are hundreds of low-cap tokens that have the potential to turn into high-cap assets.
Solana and Base have been inundated by meme coin minters recently due to their low fees and high throughput.
However, Tron is catching up, as reported by CryptoPotato, which revealed that a thousand coins have been launched every day since SunPump's launch.
Love ‘em or hate ‘em, meme coins are now a part of the crypto ecosystem, and they're here to stay.
Check out the amount of holders of popular memecoins on their respective chains pic.twitter.com/heptHbqiAF
— Coin98 Analytics (@Coin98Analytics) August 20, 2024
