First episode of 2026 and we’re setting the frame for what matters this year: AI is hitting escape velocity, “creation” is getting commoditized, and that changes everything from business models to the metaverse thesis.
We talk through the cultural shift (the 2025 existential turn), why low-sentiment periods are when you should be paying the most attention, and how social media incentives reward overreaction. Then we zoom out to the macro: metals ripping, Bitcoin lag dynamics, and what a “real” 2026 setup could look like.
On the crypto side, we dig into the creator coin debate and why the fan-to-investor switch breaks expectations, using the Nick Shirley Zora post as a live case study. Finally, we share our north star: a world where CoinGecko has an “NAT” tab, non-arbitrary tokens become a real market category, and miners distributing NAT becomes the moment the market can’t ignore.
We begin our podcast talking about some of the drama within the Ordinals community around the disruptive ability for Ordinal collection founders to make alterations to what is and is not part of their collection post mint. This falls in direct opposition to what Ordinal influencers have touted as the killer benefit to owning an Ordinal art piece as opposed to an NFT. The immutability provenance associated to Bitcoin does not seem to be applied in the metaprotocol realm and we discuss exactly why this is and detail how this will be a continued issue and potential FUD vector as the Ordinals market continues forward.
We then go into more details about the NATRIX which we will likely begin LDE within the coming days without a fixed date. We break down what Bitmap is and how the NATRIX is the most true to Bitmap metaverse ecosystem roll out since the inception of Bitmap Theory. Also, we discuss how NATRIX is a showcase demonstration of how to onboard community by utilizing a single Bitmap as a super powerful tool to align community to partake in the construction process of a virtual environment. Also highlighting how the tools developed to make NATRIX a powerhouse demonstration being publicly available for all Bitmap owners to utilize in the future.
As time goes on the Bitcoin development space continues to bifurcate and segment into separate ecosystems that deploy their own native solutions to Bitcoin’s biggest problem, its lack of programmability. We discuss with Fitzy from the TAP team how the current state of Bitcoin looks with so many emerging meta protocols, L2s, and Fractal chains entering into the equation as a potential viable solution. We contemplate the markets perceptions around the technical need of indexing in support of app development around Bitcoin and also question the merits of new entrants into the meta protocol space.
We also talk about some of the upcoming updates coming to the TAP protocol such as BRC20 support, Blockdrops, DMT data fields, and Bitmap support. Also rundown the history of Benny’s contributions to the Ordinals/Bitcoin ecosystem and highlight the significance of the TTP ecosystem in supporting the application of DMT.
We are back after a week long pause due to illness spreading around the team. We react to some of the market drama occurring within the Ordinals and DMT space, as well as address some confusions spreading around twitter. We identify the increase in attacks towards our contributions as evidence of market significance and talk about how we are approaching this environment as builders making progress while ignoring the noise. Also, we break down some of the latest updates to DMT such as the new field 4 (block height) introduction through Trac indexing, and explore details about upcoming block drop mechanism release.
We interview King, one of the pioneer builders in the DMT ecosystem who has an extensive background in NFT and Ordinal artistry. We dive into King’s early inspirations from the Ethereum NFT movement that led to identifying on-chain art on Bitcoin becoming the next major vertical of innovation for crypto artists. This realization gave King the opportunity to spawn an Ordinal collection in the early days where major infrastructure was not being provided yet. From there, the discovery of DMT through Natcats led to one of the more notable periods of DMT ecosystem development surrounding the launch of The Royals collection.
King’s ability to identify major ecosystem dilemmas contributed to the development of Privilege Authority supported by TAP protocol, to tackle some of the early day issues of UNAT minting concentration. Because of this Mscribe was able to leverage this new functionality to create new NAT distribution models such as the Blockpad. We discuss some of the drama that occurred during those development cycles and reflect on the major breakthrough of achievement as a result of this collaboration. To end we discussed the creator mindset as a successful project founder and how to handle ecosystem expansion and community alignment towards higher value goals of production. Also, we discuss what is the major opportunity DMT presents for artists and developers looking to find inspiration once again by working directly with the data substrate layer native to Bitcoin.
We discuss more updates to the NATRIX and break down core concepts that we believe in that will make the metaverse more impactful as a market sector in crypto. As we build up to our Land Distribution Event more people are asking us how will our technology stack in BitmapOS enable a better outcome than what we have seen already in previous metaverse attempts. This is a good questions as it allows us to focus on our own internal direction.
From the very beginning we have always believed the focus is always on the developer. This means not only supplying devs with the proper guidance and frameworks to build out metaverse apps more efficiently, but also ensure there are ample pathways toward monetization in order to sustain development. METAs (Metaverse Enabled Tokenized Apps) are different than a typical digital asset, they require regular maintenance and potential upgrade to remain compatible with the underlying OS stack. This introduces new layers of complexity and economic consideration in order to ensure the content being proliferated throughout the metaverse has the right foundations.
We then discuss the important opportunities that will present themself once The Natrix ecosystem matures such as the ability for land owners to generate passive income through the shared hosting of METAs. How this is done we explain through in-metaverse payment split technology and the abilities to delegate and receive delegation of assets in order to build out engaging experiences that retain user interest.
We discuss the above considerations and so much more in this podcast as well as unveil more mechanics around the built in avatar system for The Natrix. Keep your eyes open for a little teaser of a cute like Block Runner cameo in the metaverse itself ;)