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.
As we have been anticipating, there has been a surge in A.I. crypto tokens over the last 7 days. Most coins in that sector are up by 200% on average. This was predictable considering the massive amount of attention the Artificial Intelligence applications have been getting from the mainstream. The sector is small with only a handful of viable projects, but nonetheless, the application of leveraging blockchain to create distributed AI learning networks to produce consumer facing AI products is enticing to say the least. Also we speak on the overall market sentiment improving, how AI will continue to develop even outside of web3, and a major update to the Decentraland Worlds progress (ENS enabled).
We interview Travis who is the head of product at Quadrata, a web3 identity solutions protocol bringing digital passports to the blockchain applications ecosystem. We’ve always known on-chain identity was a missing component to realizing the true potential behind DeFi and other blockchain innovations, we finally found a project who is working on delivering exactly that. Quadrata enables dApps to leverage digital passports as on-chain identity verification tools to determine relevant information about its users. What will this do to the progress of DeFi and the metaverse? Also, we get into an A.I. philosophical discussion.
Decentraland has announced that DCL Worlds will no longer be constrained to a 4 parcel experience, rather it will allow DCL world owners to build without land limitation so long as they overall content experience being hosted doesn’t exceed 100MB. This move changes the game for Decentralands chances of gaining mass adoption due to lowering the barrier of entry and giving anyone the access to create value from within the metaverse. How does this affect the value of original land parcels in genesis city? Is it better to ignore the speculative risks to OG land if it means DCL worlds will bring in many more users and overall increasing the DCL ecosystem value? Also, how does AI play into all of this?
Now that we are in a deep crypto winter, influencers and public figures are perpetuating a negative sentiment towards the crypto industry as a whole, labeling it as one giant scam operation. We take the liberty in explaining how not EVERYTHING in the crypto and web3 arena is being developed by scammers. A lot of what is interpreted to be scams are just projects that have good intentions looking to innovate and experiment, but simply are only able to prove a concept and not sustain their innovations for lengthy periods of time. This is due to the technologies of blockchain, NFTs, tokens, etc being so new, failure becomes a normal part of the growth and maturation of them. We also speak about AI and how it can be applied to spark a new crypto sector to evolve NFTs and DeFi.
First podcast of 2023 we go over the last few weeks of 2022. We recover from the hot ones challenge where we eat a series of progressively spicy chicken wings. OpenAI takes humanity by storm and is now valued at $29 billion because Microsoft intends to invest $10B with a loan when paid back would give them 49% of OpenAI. We look into how the AI craze could have an influence on the crypto industry. We come up with theoretical applications of AI and the ethos of crypto where the community is incentivized to contribute data to an AI with rewarding them with a token. Listen in catch our take on the AI takeover!