We break down the state of the Meme economy and make comparisons to what we saw in the 2021 bull cycle. Memes on Solana have strong parallels to the NFT market on Ethereum from last cycle, especially when you compare revenue figures of the top marketplaces like pump.fun to Opensea. We give our thoughts on where we are on the timeline of meme mania and speak about the impacts memes are having on the broader crypto market. This includes methods of launching new projects by leveraging memes as a more user friendly go to market vehicle to onboard community and then adding complexity layers down the road to not off-put sentiment.
Also, when it comes to marketing narratives memes seem to be dominating the mind share so we discuss how we are approaching $NAT from a marketing perspective. Now that $NAT is weeks away from officially becoming Bitcoin’s second subsidy reward coin, how we classify this new coin is important for public perception. Some do not see $NAT as a candidate to fit within the existing market demographic of memes and rather see a new narrative formed around the coin that distinguishes it from the meme asset class due to its technical provenance to DMT and the broader mission of supplying Bitcoin miners with additional subsidy to sustain network security. We discuss our thoughts on this and also the liquidity dilemma when it comes to supporting Bitcoin assets. All sectors of the Bitcoin ecosystem are facing this problem and are actively working toward building solutions that can either bring more liquidity to Bitcoin from other chains or port Bitcoin native assets to other chains like Solana to benefit from those capital markets.
We were part of a truly unique experience where we did an in-world podcast in the virtual world Hyperfy. We were part of a panel with some metaverse OGs, Routan, Morph, and Jin. We discussed our history and experience building in the open metaverse over the last few years and how that unique experience can be applied for the Bitmap ecosystem. Jin specifically has built a massive variety of open source technologies to enable developers to expand on his work. With the opportunity that Bitmap presents, an open canvas for metaverse development is available and needs the contribution of industry experts to provide the necessary infrastructure to fuel a thriving ecosystem. This is one of the more interesting conversations and experiences we have had on the channel.
Today we interviewed Tom Lehman, founder of the Ethscription protocol which is acting to enable digital artifact inscriptions on Ethereum. This is a big deal because it expands the digital artifact movement beyond just the scope of Ordinals and Bitcoin. This begs the question of why does Ethereum need to inscribe if the ecosystem has done so much already with smart contracts and IPFS pointers. Tom outlines the several benefits ethscribing has over minting NFTs in added security, true immutability, and even cost efficiencies. With the Ethereum layer 2 ecosystem now becoming more obviously centralized, the narrative for a new option when creating digital goods on-chain comes at a perfect time. Will ethscriptions be the next big thing to pop off on Ethereum and become a major ecosystem to build for just like Ordinals?
We interview the founder of TRAC, Benny, who is working tirelessly on providing critical indexing infrastructure to the Ordinals and BRC20 space. Benny explains his origins as an Ethereum developer and his switchover to the Ordinals arena which led him to build a suite of necessary tools for Inscriptions. As he was developing he discovered a huge gap in decentralized indexing which led him to build Trac and eventually the TAP protocol. Now with TAP, inscription tokens with more robust functionality can be created which is the fundamental need to enable DeFi, which Benny is labeling as OrdFi. How much infrastructure remains and what are plans moving forward for Trac and TAP? We discuss in this episode.
We interview a core community member of the Ord team which is working on building the virtual machine on top of Bitcoin called BOSS. This is a very much-needed initiative as it will bring in much needed functionality and robustness to the Ordinal space. As of right now, the BRC20 token standard is the standard mechanism to spin up a semi-fungible token ecosystem. With the BOSS system a new token standard can emerge enabling developers to build on top of more functions. If this works out it could be one of the biggest moments in Ordinals history, similar to early Ethereum days for the overall blockchain space.
We finally took a moment to peer outside of what is happening in web3 besides Ordinals and Bitmap. We haven’t properly analyzed the state of sentiment overall since we began heavily following Ordinals once BRC20s were introduced back in March and April. Since then, we’ve found ourselves in a much more positive sentiment as content creators because of all the rapid innovations and foundational value creations happening on Bitcoin. However, once we looked back on the rest of web3, we found a much more depressing outlook due to major hacks and exploits, SEC attacks on HEX, constant rugpulls, and overall notable influencers pushing an anti crypto narrative. This leads us to believe we are likely in a peak bear market stage which according to the Wall Street Market Psychology Cheat Sheet is the depression phase. Also, we introduce the idea of digital matter theory which speaks to the idea of creating digital value through non-arbitrary processes that are reliant on blockchain data and information.