**Welcome back to episode 279 of The Block Runner Podcast. As always, we have your host William talking with your cohost I-man as we discuss cryptocurrency developments while we make this new technology relatable to you. You can watch the full episode on YouTube AND stay up to date by subscribing to our newsletter at TheBlockRunner.com.
Here are some of the topics they discuss today:**
First up, revisit Bitcoin DeFi through the lens of this cycle’s emerging “industry cook”: digital-asset treasury companies.
Next, Do we really need native Bitcoin primitives, or will off-chain/custodial routes—UTXO time-locks and loan products be enough to make BTC productive?
and Finally, we pressure-test trench metas like Pokémon “phygital” and map where the music could stop.
Alright, let’s listen in!
We interview the CEO of Xverse, Bitcoin’s #1 wallet provider who recently secured a 5 million dollar seed round of funding to expand and scale their services. Xverse has been deeply involved in the Bitcoin development space, originally being a team member of Stacks which is the leading layer 2 solution to Bitcoin. For many years, Stacks was regarded as the only viable solution to building applications like products on Bitcoin, which led Xverse to build a wallet that would improve the user experience overall for users of that network. Now with the introduction of Ordinals this year, Xverse took the chance to support the ecosystem in its early days and is now the #1 provider for Ordinal asset holders. We discuss what the future of building on Bitcoin looks like and how critical infrastructure needs to be built in order to compete with Ethereum and its smart contract development ecosystem.
We interviewed one of the founders of the FOXXI team which is one of the leading contributors in building utility for the bitmap ecosystem. After the blockout of Bitmap districts, the major question has been who will step up to build and provide the necessary infrastructure to expand the ecosystem in order for Bitmap to become a major force in the metaverse. FOXXI is working on exactly this by focusing on the social side by creating a platform allowing Ordinal owners to form relationships and also by creating a bitverse where community members will be able to deploy their own virtual environment to connect and explore. This is one of the first attempts at building a 3D immersive layer on top of Bitmap that will grant new utility to all Bitmap owners. We discuss also a built in mechanism that will allow Bitmap owners who deploy their Virtual Environments to extract “bits” which will serve as a mechanism to reward BRC20 tokens down the line, introducing an even greater utility proposition.
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.