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.
Right off the heels of the biggest competition in Decentraland, a soccer tournament with 24 crypto companies face off on Moonshot! Iman has been commentating while the rest of the team has been preparing and competing in the tournament. We also discover a pattern we're seeing in the crypto space found in almost all sectors of the economy. The 80/20 rule where 80% of the audience focuses on the speculative aspects of a given market while the remaining 20% focuses on production, feasibility, improvement of that same market. The Decentralized Finance space is surging at the moment with the surge of new tokens appearing for trade. Finally, our final topic is how gaming will evolve in Decentraland.
In Texas we're experiencing another wave of Corona Virus illnesses and many cities are recommending people to stay at home as often as possible. In today's podcast we heed their advice as we host another discussion from a long distance. We start the conversation with the implications of NFT game assets. Do they need to be supported long term? Is it reasonable to expect developers to support their NFT assets in all future games? With the popular use of the Ethereum network, gas fees have been at levels detrimental to the end user. Its beginning to interfere with business operating on the network, and the source seems to be from Tether. We also begin tossing around the idea of a MetaZone token. What is the use of such token and we begin to formulate the early design of tokenomics. As we continue to contribute to the construction to Decentraland, we postulate on what sorts of activities are needed to bring a thousand daily active users? Finally, could Ethermon gameplay be the start of longterm gameplay in Decentraland? Will this contribute to bringing in thousands of active users?
William and Iman gather to discuss the latest updates with MetaZone and Decentraland. This week we go over our discoveries in incentivizing players to participate in competitive gameplay for prizes. Â We've gone through monetization as part of a gameplay mechanic and now we've held the largest prize for a competition. We'll be testing new ideas to see player interaction. NFT interoperability has been one of the main topics we discuss internally often. We go over what interoperability means, how it could impact gameplay, and the developer cost of doing so. Part of our daily activities is supporting the upcoming Ethermon game in Decentraland. We go over some details of some of the gameplay mechanics and what players will be able to do with their new Ethermon pets. Finally, we also announce the winner to our largest competition so far and the biggest prize so far; a land parcel in Decentraland.
We are proud to announce our collaboration with Ethermon to bring Digital Pets into Decentraland! In this collaboration we help the Ethermon team distribute their digital pet game to various landowners. Each landowner will be able to sell Ethermon as well We started this journey with just a podcast that evolved into a tool for the Decentraland community that allows creators to fund their own development. Each user generated creation is on its way to becoming an NFT and on that path we’ve generated over 2 million mana. That means over 1.4 million mana directly in the hands of the creators. With that level of creative resources we expect to see more development into Decentraland which will bring us closer to a well populated metaverse.
We interview Riorio from DCLPlazas.com, the leading provider of information, news, highlights, and so much more content describing whats going on in the metaverse. Rio is one of the original community members in Decentraland, giving him an extremely valuable perspective on the progression of the platform. The idea of an open decentralized metaverse is what initially attracted him to the space, and ever since then his mission has been to cover this evolution through the media platform he has created. Now dclplazas.com is expanding to cover additional blockchain based virtual worlds such as Somnium Space and Cryptovoxels.