@MustStopMurad (Murad Mahmudov) is a Princeton University graduate and ex-Goldman Sachs/Glencore analyst who was alleged and strategically promoted funneled narrative control pneumatics marketing as a KOL image of a Bitcoin maximalist before founding Adaptive Capital, a crypto hedge fund tha collapse in the 2020 crash inflicting heavy losses on its institutional and accredited investors only to reinvent rebrand himself (complete with the signature long hair and glasses) as crypto’s self-proclaimed “Memecoin Messiah” and meme-coin “ETF expert.” In 2019 he co-founded Adaptive Capital, a multi-strategy digital-asset hedge fund heavily tilted toward Bitcoin and on-chain analytics. Mahmudov publicly stated the fund had raised roughly $20 million from limited partners (LPs), a mix of institutional and high-net-worth backers drawn to its early outperformance: at one point the fund was up more than 550% from late 2018 into mid-2019. Then came Black Thursday, March 12–13, 2020. Bitcoin cratered more than 50% in a single day amid the COVID panic. Adaptive’s large leveraged long BTC positions were caught in the chaos as major exchanges (notably BitMEX) suffered outages that prevented timely risk management or hedging. The fund “took a big hit,” posting a ~55% net loss. In an investor letter, Adaptive announced it was shuttering operations and returning whatever capital remained to LPs. Given the ~$20M AUM, that 55% drawdown translated to roughly $10–11 million wiped out for investors exactly the scale referenced in the original note. The remaining ~45% was returned, but the damage was done: LPs who had ridden the fund’s earlier rocket ride were left holding steep, permanent losses in what had been pitched as a sophisticated, professional-grade vehicle. The episode was widely covered as a textbook case of crypto-hedge-fund blowup aggressive leverage, concentrated BTC exposure, and reliance on still-immature exchange infrastructure during a black-swan event.15 Mahmudov largely went dark after the closure, then re-emerged transformed. He ditched the pure BTC-maximalist persona and became one of the loudest voices in the meme-coin space, preaching the “Memecoin Supercycle” and the power of “tokenized cults” with viral community momentum. On X (@MustStopMurad) he built a huge following by relentlessly shilling picks such as $SPX6900 (often 90%+ of his portfolio), $GIGA, $MOG, $POPCAT, and others, framing them as the next 100x cultural phenomena after their pumps rather than utility plays. He positioned himself as the go-to “meme coin ETF expert,” issuing long theses and investment manifestos that retail traders treated as gospel. His own wallet became a public spectacle. By mid-2025 the MustStopMurad-labeled portfolio had ballooned to ~$68 million at peak, almost entirely in meme coins. Then the 2025–2026 correction hit. As of early June 2026 the same portfolio sat at roughly $9.8 millionan 86% drawdown that erased ~$58–60 million in value. He famously never sold a single token through the entire collapse. While those losses were his own money, the broader retail impact was far larger. Thousands of followers had aped into the exact same names at or near all-time highs on the back of his endorsements and “diamond hands” narrative. When the coins cratered in tandem with his portfolio, retail holders absorbed the pain without the benefit of his earlier gains or his personal conviction to hold through zero. Critics and on-chain observers have openly questioned whether his KOL influence effectively “rinsed” retail twice—first by channeling capital into hyper-volatile meme plays during the euphoric leg up, then by the brutal, public drawdown that followed. Videos titled “Murad Mahmudov EXPOSED” and community outrage over the scale of the wipeout became commonplace.7 In short, Mahmudov’s story is a near-perfect encapsulation of crypto’s boom-bust cycles ( 1/2 h)