A slew of tech bros—including the richest man in the world, Elon Musk—have adopted Mog Coin’s crypto-famous branding, apparently leading the Ethereum and Base token to pump 51% on the week, per data from CoinGecko.
Mog Coin (MOG) is a meme coin referencing the slang phrase “mogging” or “to mog,” a term that originated on controversial image board 4Chan in 2016, according to KnowYourMeme. Put simply, it means to dominate somebody or something, often via physical strength or good looks.
However, the meme coin took this phrase and evolved its meaning to “effortless cosmic domination,” while adding viral branding of a laughing cat wearing Pit Viper sunglasses.
On Sunday, Musk changed his X profile picture to add the Pit Vipers that MOG has become synonymous with. Soon after, Garry Tan, CEO of tech startup accelerator Y Combinator, also put on the glasses, adding that he will “always be mogging” in what crypto supporters have taken as a more direct acknowledgment of the token.
To help turbo-charge the trend, a MOG team member created a Grok AI prompt that stylizes profile pictures and adds Pit Vipers to them—creating a dedicated X account for it.
Other notable tech figures like millionaire biohacker Bryan Johnson, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, and X employee Nate Esparza have also jumped on the trend.
This infiltration of the tech industry has been nicknamed “mog/acc” by community members, saluting to the pro-tech effective accelerationism—referred to as e/acc—philosophical movement. The founder of the movement, former Google quantum computing engineer Guillaume Verdon, better known as BasedBeffJezos on X, also embraced Mog.
“Caved to the mog/acc PFP virus,” he wrote on X, after adding Pit Vipers to his profile picture.
The viral buzz made some X users question whether the Mog Coin team had been lobbying tech bros behind the scenes to endorse the token, but a Mog Coin team member told Decrypt that the phenomenon wasn’t planned.
“Organic as usual with MOG,” Mog Coin creative director Mike Three told Decrypt. “[Everything] happened in public on the timeline. This is why MOG is so special in my opinion.”
What about the Pit Vipers?
Mog Coin was launched in 2023 by pseudonymous founder Aug, following months of joking about creating the token within a group chat of Milady NFT community members.
The first branding idea that stuck was Hunter Biden wearing Pit Viper glasses. Then, as the project matured, the community evolved the meme to be associated with its current mascot Joycat, a combination of emojis, later adding “effortless cosmic domination” as a phrase to explain mogging.
Throughout its almost two-year lifespan, the Pit Viper brand mostly ignored the meme coin. However, with “mog/acc” taking over the timeline, the brand’s official X account started interacting with the community.
“Adding Pit Vipers to your [profile picture] is cool, but how about adding some to your cart?” the X account wrote to a middling response. “Oh, nobody cares? What if I say mog?”
A couple hours later, the account offered a 10% discount for those using the MOG69 code at checkout. Later, the account changed its bio to “horney moggles,” and asked the community to send pizza—a reference to a prank the meme coin community played on Pit Viper early on.
Pit Viper co-founder and CEO Chris Garcin also appears to have embraced the mog/acc trend, while trying to add pv/acc into the equation. However, on Wednesday, Garcin used his X account to promote Pitcoin (PITCOIN), a day-old Solana token launched via Pump.fun that peaked at a $6.7 million market cap following his post. It quickly crashed to $885,000.
Garcin later added that Pit Viper nor himself have any “affiliation” with the token, and that he just “threw $50 in for fun.” Still, some people blamed Garcin for ever promoting the token in the first place.
“This is both a bull case for MOG in contrast and a perfect example of how confusing, overwhelming, and toxic crypto participants can be,” Mike Three posted on X. “This shit is supposed to be fun, but from the outside it is a literal nightmare. Nobody has to take the time to help anyone get up to speed but I really don’t understand the outrage.”
Edited by Andrew Hayward
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