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 recap the events of the last week leading up to what was supposed to be the Redacted launch. After the testing results the Mscribe team felt the need to delay the launch another week to refine the Blockpad experience and address minting issues. We walk through the individual tests and talk about a major debacle we had to overcome. We then discuss the process of Blockpad minting and speculate on the future evolution of it.Â
Afterwards we reflect on the previous bear cycle and identify the similarities between then and now. Also, we discuss Bitmap and it’s stagnant state, emphasizing the need for more developers to step in to push the ecosystem forward.
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Will and Iman discuss the current state of crypto markets and the mass delusional state backing the importance of meme culture and the dissolution of utility driven initiatives in web3. Ultimately are meme influencers and tokens hurting the crypto space as a whole? Or is this just a separate sector of importance that has no influence on the progression of web3 innovation and potentially will be used for good to drive more interest and participants toward projects with more substance.Â
We then discuss the importance of DMT and non-arbitrary tokens and how they can potentially influence market sentiment given wider adoption. In a market where inspirational innovations are largely lacking, can the idea of Bitcoin data utilization for token generation captivate the minds of the people similar to how early day NFTs did?
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The L2 and DeFi discussion in relation to Bitcoin are perhaps some of the most important ones when determining the future of Bitcoin. It is clear Bitcoin will not be able to scale into the future, regardless of how much robust innovation we add to it through metaprotocol design.Â
However, ecosystem contributors such as Sovryn are working diligently to implement some of the cutting edge in Bitcoin scaling technologies to create favorable environments for development. We discuss with a core contributor to Sovryn, Edan Yago, the technical challenges in rolling out this type of infrastructure and break down the comparisons between existing side chains to Bitcoin which do not consider the same trust minimizing components.Â
The conversation explores many interesting facets to Bitcoin development and considers the reality of Bitcoin entering into a phase shift that renders all other chains redundant as Bitcoin infinite scalability becomes a reality as rollup technology becomes solidified.
We speak with our guest Sandman who is a major contributor to the OXBT community and is now working to organize an up and coming Runes PFP project called Bitdogs. Bitdogs is one of the first Ordinal PFP collections to commit to a Rune token distribution once the protocol goes live. We discuss how this project came to be and the intentions behind tying together this new class of fungible token with their non-fungible collection that will be minting soon.
Since the release of the UNAT addition to the DMT framework about 6 weeks ago, Natcats have taken the NFT space by storm by introducing for the first time a truly unique value proposition to the digital asset space. Ev, founder of Natcats was the first to deploy an art collection that fully utilized the Unique Non-arbitrary Token framework. This enables the digital asset supply existence and the artistic characteristics of the art itself to be solely determined by block data.
Up until now all NFT art collections have had arbitrary supplies, largely in the realm of a 10k supply which was a market narrative set forth by Cryptopunks in the early days of NFTs. Now, due to the introduction of DMT, non-arbitrary digital asset genesis can be produced by the Bitcoin blockchain itself by leveraging existing NAT frameworks and clever utilization of inscription native technologies such as recursion. Since the deployment Natcats has generated more than 500BTC in secondary market volume and is quickly gaining awareness among some of the biggest NFT players who are desperately seeking new innovations in the digital asset space. We break down with Ev his experience since launch and his motivations behind the creation itself, as well as future plans.