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 review the Halloween event that Decentraland launched that showcased a quest that spanned over 5 days. It showcased questing that required you to teleport to different locations to finish off your tasks. This shows that our premise that you can build a game without owning a large connected parcel. We also discuss the most dominant NFT asset class that represents over 99% of all NFTs. There's a new NFT class emerging that we consider as a productive NFT versus the well known unproductive NFT which depends on the Greater Fool Theory.
We look back on a year of content development in Decentraland. We go from a gray grid of 90,000 parcels to a fully rendered representation of actual content deployed within the metaverse (https://decentraland.icu/). We provide how it makes logical sense that all NFT minting projects will use a side chain because its a sound business decision. If a sidechain wasn't an option will it make sense for developers to keep assets off chain to avoid gas fees? We try to make sense of an NFT art being sold for $110K. We break down what's needed to sell art in the 6 figures.
How the rug pull culture is slowly eroding the morale of everyone in the crypto space. The more projects with anonymous founders the more likely a rug pull becomes more likely. The trend of an anonymous founders is a sign of the infancy of the space. We're noticing some valuable mechanics being implemented by these anonymous founders that we believe legitimate projects will implement as a justifiable mechanism. We've seen a lot of missed opportunities by NFT minting platforms using ERC20 tokens that can be improved on. Ethermon drops their biggest announcement yet, they have just acquired the Battle District which is 668 parcels! We also show off our Corona Zombie wearable in Decentraland!
Episode 86 kicks off with a discussion on tokenomics design the MetaZone platform. We discuss how we encourage participation on the platform by rewarding the creators and collectors with platform tokens. Gas fees have calmed down recently, but increasing gas prices are just around the corner. Honeyswap is a fork of Uniswap but built on top of the xDAI network. This means that swaps cost almost no gas but the downside is coins need to use a bridge for them to work on the 2nd layer. We drop in some technical analysis into the podcast to show that sometimes it does work but its an unreliable tool. Finally, the community that created the $HNY token called 1Hive.org uses a way to verify their members and one of them created Honeyswap.
With the latest UNI airdrop, we dive into thinking through all the possible airdrops that could occur from other platforms. Uniswap has grown to a volume that has surpassed larger centralized exchanges such as Coinbase. With a decentralized exchange releasing a token to reward the behavior they want to encourage, Uniswap is poised to grow even larger. In this podcast, we break down the connection between SORA and Polkaswap. As we look for the next sector of the industry to do a parabolic run up, we speculate that the next ecosystem with high potential would be Polkadot. We also dive into the Plasm platform and we breakdown their lockdrop protocol.