When the Bogdanoffs Met Crypto: How a Pump It Meme Became Part of Digital Culture

The crypto community lost two of its most unlikely mascots in early 2022. When Igor Bogdanoff passed away just days after his twin brother Grichka died from coronavirus complications, traders worldwide shared a joke that had become as much a part of cryptocurrency culture as charts and technical analysis. The “pump it” meme—those instantly recognizable requests for someone to manipulate the market—would forever be linked to the Bogdanoff brothers, who somehow managed to become mythical figures in a space built on speculation and irony.

The Pump It Meme and Market Manipulation as Comedy

At the heart of the Bogdanoff phenomenon lies a remarkably simple but enduring joke. In the most viral version, Grichka holds an iPhone to his chiseled face while asking some mysterious figure with market-moving power to either “pump” or “dump” (sometimes playfully rendered as “pomp” or “domp”) the cryptocurrency markets. What started as scattered internet humor crystallized into a cultural phenomenon when YouTuber Bizonacci created “He Bought,” a minute-long video featuring the wojack meme—those crude black-lined drawings of average internet users—driven to madness by the twin brothers consistently taking the opposite side of every trade.

By the time the crypto world mourned their deaths, the pump it meme had transcended its origins as a joke. One Twitter user’s tribute captured the dark humor perfectly: “RIP Grichka Bogdanoff, no wonder everything is dumping.” It was a fitting eulogy for two men who had become inseparable from the market’s most cynical laughs.

More Than Just a Punchline: The Deeper Meaning

While memes often signal entertainment above all else, the pump it narrative carried a sharper edge. On one level, it acknowledged something traders rarely admit aloud: cryptocurrency markets are fundamentally speculative. The Bogdanoff meme served as a compressed commentary on the outsized influence that early investors, project insiders, and wealthy bagholders wielded over token prices. It was self-aware, occasionally mean-spirited, yet ultimately accepted by the community as all in good fun.

The genius of the meme lay in its self-referential nature. It wasn’t crude market manipulation theory—it was commentary on the fact that someone, somewhere, always seemed to profit when the rest of the market suffered. The Bogdanoffs became the perfect mascots for this dark humor precisely because their public personas already blurred the line between deliberate absurdity and genuine mystery.

The Bogdanoffs: From Science Television to Crypto Royalty

The brothers rose to prominence during the ICO rally of 2017, though their entry into cryptocurrency culture was almost accidental. They were already internet celebrities of a particular sort—European nobility who had built a media career as “science clowns,” hosting the French science fiction program “Temps X” in the 1970s and 1980s. Their unmistakable appearance—nearly identical brunette hairstyles, angular features, and faces that appeared heavily enhanced whether through Botox, plastic surgery, or both—made them instantly recognizable and eminently meme-able.

The twins seemed to understand their place in the cultural ecosystem. In an interview with the French television show “Non Stop People,” Igor revealed that an image of Grichka had been downloaded more than 1.3 billion times and circulated across blockchains dating back to the early 2010s. They even claimed to have been colleagues of Satoshi Nakamoto and suggested they had contributed to Bitcoin’s development—a statement that straddled the line between playfulness and provocation.

Walking the Line Between Fact and Fiction

The Bogdanoffs’ entire careers had been exercises in ambiguity. Throughout the 1990s, they faced plagiarism accusations regarding their book “God and Science,” which they eventually settled. Their scientific papers on pre-Big Bang physics became the center of “the Bogdanov affair,” an academic controversy that raised questions about peer review rigor. More recently, they navigated accusations of financial impropriety involving a wealthy individual. Yet through it all, they maintained their public personas with an almost defiant style.

Whether discussing quantum physics, appearing on television, or starring in films, the twins embodied a strange fusion of legitimate scientific ambition and theatrical spectacle. They denied undergoing cosmetic procedures while simultaneously embracing an aesthetic that pushed the boundaries of conventional beauty. The question of whether they were genuine eccentrics or knowing performers playing a role was never resolved—and perhaps that ambiguity was the point.

A Legacy Written in Memes and Memory

It should come as little surprise that two men who spent decades walking the boundary between reality and performance became legends in an industry predicated on speculation and irony. Cryptocurrency attracted them because the space itself embraced similar contradictions—genuine technological innovation mixed with speculative fervor, serious developers alongside obvious charlatans, and communities that laugh at themselves while simultaneously making fortunes and losing everything.

The pump it meme endures because it captures something true about markets and human nature. When traders invoke the Bogdanoffs today, they’re acknowledging not just that someone always benefits when you lose money, but that the whole process can be simultaneously infuriating and hilarious. The twins understood performance. They understood how to be simultaneously real and ironic, scientifically ambitious and visibly theatrical.

In death, they achieved a kind of immortality in the crypto narrative. Every time someone posts the meme—every pump, every dump, every joke about which way the market will move—the Bogdanoffs are there, their chiseled cheekbones and enigmatic presence a reminder that cryptocurrency is as much about storytelling and collective imagination as it is about blockchain technology. They may have asked us to pump it or dump it, but what they actually left behind was something far more lasting: a perfect encapsulation of how we tell stories about markets and power.