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January 27, 2026

Summary

This episode of the Blockrunner Podcast breaks down one of the most revealing weeks we’ve seen at the intersection of crypto, AI, and creator monetization.

What began as a promising experiment in creator capital markets quickly turned into a live stress test for liquidity, incentives, and trust. We walk through the rise and collapse of the Ralph token, why it initially made sense, how it gained traction, and why it unraveled the moment the creator sold. The fallout wasn’t just about price action. It exposed deeper structural problems that most internet capital markets haven’t solved yet.

From there, the conversation expands into the accelerating timeline toward AGI, why looping AI systems and agent swarms change the nature of work, and what happens to human purpose when intelligence becomes abundant. We react to Davos conversations, including moments where Bitcoin is openly laughed at by legacy financial institutions, and explain why those reactions reveal more ignorance than confidence.

We then tackle the uncomfortable question most Bitcoin holders avoid: how the network remains secure long-term. Transaction fees alone are not a viable answer. We explore why Bitcoin’s security budget faces a real challenge over the next decade and why a second subsidy may be the only credible path forward without changing Bitcoin’s core protocol.

This episode ties everything together into a single thesis. Internet capital markets are early, powerful, and inevitable, but without proper incentive design and liquidity structure, they will continue to fail in dramatic fashion.

If you’re thinking seriously about AI, crypto, creator monetization, and Bitcoin’s future, this episode will challenge your assumptions.

Learn more about the second subsidy thesis at natgmi.com.

158

Summary

We break down our recent HUGE ANNOUNCEMENT where we discuss our project MetaZone raising 3 Million dollars in a seed round. This is very exciting for us as we’ve been building in the metaverse space for more than 3 years. All the hard work is paying off and we are now able to take our platform to the next stage to expand the application ecosystem of the 3D virtual realm. MetaZone is an app store where creators can upload 3D functional content that enables buyers to purchase the content as NFTs, and then deploy them directly onto land in the metaverse. Once deployed, users can interact with the content directly and experience the creations for all the beauty and utility they can offer. YouTube and crypto are our passions, but contributing to the metaverse with our project is one as well. We thank everyone who supports us and joins our community as we continue to develop and expand.

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157

Summary

We recap the interview we recently had with the co-founder of Bitensor, Jacob Steeves. The main profound statements from the interview include alignment theory between AI and humans through the use of cryptocurrencies. Also, the realization that a decentralized AI system will at one point scale to a massive network that corporate AI will have to participate. Also, we talk about how Sam Altman’s new initiatives with Helios and Worldcoin. Can providing humanity with a universal UBI of a crypto token be what is needed to align all people on earth toward a common goal of economic stability in the wake of human displacement as a result of AI. Are Sam Altman and Sam Bankman Freid alot alike in there views and does that impact the amount of trust society should have in Sam Altman after what happened to SBF? Also, what will it take to catalyze the metaverse in the same way ChatGPT has catalyzed the AI market to emerge, or how netscape onboarded millions of users to the internet? We try to identify what those events will look like for the metaverse.

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156

Summary

We spoke with Jacob Robert Steeves who is the founder of Bittensor, a project working to bring artificial intelligence to the blockchain space in hopes of decentralizing ownership and control over the technology. This project has been in development for many years and has an already viable ecosystem with operating nodes, validators, and stakers. The incentive mechanism they have incorporated involved the minting and distribution of TAO tokens which is the reward for participants in the ecosystem. The economics of the token follow Bitcoins exactly in its total supply and emission schedule. This is to ensure the network needed to support and grow Bittensor’s machine learning systems can grow to the scale of what Bitcoin has done. If successful the computational power of Bittensor will be 500 times more of what Google’s entire data infrastructure could provide. Jacob Steeves goes in depth about the philosophies that motivated him and his foundational team to work on this initiative and how the future of AI will look.

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155

Summary

We have been deep in the weeds of this Bitcoin Ordinals ecosystem growth for a couple of months, and with the recent phenomena of BRC20 tokens. The interest in this ecosystem is growing exponentially, and we want to find every bit of information about how it works, what effects is it causing on Bitcoin, and how far this could go. The current BRC20 mania is causing serious protocol-level disruptions to the Bitcoin network. How the community decides to react to this dilemma will decide the future for Bitcoin and whether or not it will evolve past just a store of value vehicle. On top of this, how will this have an effect on the metaverse if at all? Why is development for the metaverse so difficult and what methods might possibly be introduced to bring the kind of liquidity the BRC20 space is experiencing to the metaverse sector?

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154

Summary

We start by discussing a recent conference called consensys and how the industry sentiment is improving especially around the metaverse. Then we go over the details of AI danger and how the godfather of AI who received a Turing award has decided to sound the alarm bells against the dangers of allowing AI development to continue without regulation. What are the actual dangers and how bad will it get? How does web3 solve this potential problem and how long will it take for AI to be as ubiquitously adopted as the Internet ? How does Bittensor fit into this timeline and ultimately, how much value will the TAO network output when in its fully mature state? We then cross into the Bitcoin realm and discuss the continued growth of the Ordinals ecosystem as BRC20 market is accelerating at an exponential pace. How does this compare to the early days of Ethereum, and if the infrastructure is built needed to make BRC20s a viable fungible token standard, how will the two ecosystems compare. Can the BRC20 market one day become a multi-billion dollar industry the way Ethereum ERC20 market has?

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