The "Pump It" Meme Architects: How the Bogdanoff Twins Shaped Crypto Culture

In the pantheon of cryptocurrency folklore, few cultural artifacts have resonated as deeply as the pump it meme—and few figures embody this phenomenon quite like Igor and Grichka Bogdanoff. With Igor’s passing in early January 2022, just days after his twin brother succumbed to complications from coronavirus, the crypto community lost two of its most enigmatic—and unintentionally iconic—personalities. Their departure marks the end of an era for a meme that came to define how traders joked about market manipulation, speculation, and the often-absurd nature of crypto trading itself.

The Pump It Meme: A Window Into Crypto Psychology

To understand the Bogdanoffs’ outsized influence on crypto culture, one must first appreciate how the pump it meme became a cultural cornerstone of the trading community. The basic premise is delightfully simple: Grichka, iPhone pressed to his chiseled face, contacts some shadowy figure with the power to move markets, issuing commands to either “pump” or “dump” the market (sometimes playfully rendered as “pomp” or “domp”). It sounds absurd, and it is—but that absurdity conceals a deeper truth about how cryptocurrencies trade.

YouTuber Bizonacci crystallized the joke into a viral minute-long video titled “He Bought,” which featured a wojack—those crude black-lined sketches of the everyman internet user—being systematically driven into financial ruin by the counter-trading Bogdanoffs. The video captured something traders felt viscerally: the sense that whenever they took a position, the market moved against them. In some ways, the pump it meme functioned as both comedy and catharsis for a community prone to dramatic swings between euphoria and despair.

Unlikely Architects of Meme Legacy

What made Igor and Grichka such perfect vessels for this meme had everything to do with their unmistakable appearance. Their nearly identical brunette quiffs, prominently squared jaws, and faces that appeared almost extraterrestrial—whether through makeup, cosmetic procedures, or pure genetics—made them instantly recognizable. The twins leaned into the strangeness, sometimes claiming they enjoyed looking like “aliens,” while consistently denying they’d undergone plastic surgery, even as speculation persisted.

This visual distinctiveness transformed them into something greater than their individual achievements: they became mythical figures in the crypto imagination. By 2017, at the height of the initial coin offering boom, the Bogdanoffs had achieved an almost deity-like status in crypto communities—the puppet masters behind every trade, the reason your portfolio was red while others’ were green. It was, in essence, a collective exorcism of trader paranoia channeled through two eccentric French celebrities.

From Science to Speculation: The Bogdanoffs’ Unlikely Journey

The twins’ path to crypto immortality was anything but conventional. In the 1970s and 1980s, they co-hosted “Temps X,” a French science fiction television program that established their initial media presence. But their credibility in scientific circles proved more complicated. In the 1990s, they faced plagiarism allegations related to their book “God and Science.” More notably, around the turn of the millennium, they published several scientific papers proposing theories about the pre-Big Bang universe—work that later became the center of what became known as the Bogdanov affair, a controversy that raised questions about peer review and scientific rigor.

By most accounts, the Bogdanoffs were comfortable operating in ambiguous spaces: part serious academics, part entertainers, part provocateurs. In a 2021 interview with the French television program “Non Stop People,” they claimed to have been colleagues of Satoshi Nakamoto and suggested they had contributed to Bitcoin’s development—statements that were characteristically difficult to verify. When questioned about their image, Igor suggested that Nakamoto himself had circulated Grichka’s photograph across 1.3 billion instances on various blockchains between 2010 and 2012. Whether true or fabricated, the claim perfectly encapsulated their approach to truth: simultaneously tongue-in-cheek and delivered with unsettling sincerity.

More Than Meme: Their True Cultural Impact

The genius of Igor and Grichka’s place in crypto history transcends simple meme-dom. The pump it meme, while ostensibly a joke, encoded something fundamental about cryptocurrency markets: their speculative nature, the concentration of influence in certain hands, and the outsized power wielded by early adopters and project insiders—the bagholders who could move prices with coordinated action. In laughing at the Bogdanoffs’ imagined omnipotence, traders were also confessing to a collective suspicion about how crypto really operated.

The twins embodied the paradox that has always hovered over the crypto space—the blurred line between absurdity and reality, between legitimate science and speculative fever. They walked that line deliberately, perhaps even mischievously. In interviews, they demonstrated a keen awareness of their status as memes and seemed content with it, neither aggressively denying nor earnestly claiming their legendary status. They were, in other words, trolls in the truest sense—and crypto loves its trolls.

A Legacy Written in Memes

The Bogdanoffs’ departure represents something more than the loss of two eccentric personalities. It marks the passing of figures who, whether intentionally or not, became cultural anchors for an entire community. The pump it meme will endure—memes always do—but it loses something irreplaceable with their absence. No one else can embody that particular combination of otherworldly appearance, scientific pretension, and deadpan absurdity that made Igor and Grichka singular.

In a space often criticized for its cynicism, its excess, and its willingness to blur the line between ambition and fraud, the Bogdanoffs represented something oddly humanizing: the admission that crypto is fundamentally speculative, that chance and luck matter as much as skill, and that sometimes the best response to market chaos is to find it darkly funny. In that sense, the pump it meme wasn’t just about them—it was about all of us, our paranoia and our humor in equal measure. The twins are gone, but the meme, and what it reveals about crypto culture, will persist.