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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.

42

Summary

The feeling of despair can sometimes be confused with a pattern on a chart. We show real examples of despair by the sentiment of cryptocurrencies from different locations of the internet. The feeling is very real and is being felt by many, this is why many of the predictions of the bottom have some weight. The recent crypto purge just illustrates an example of why the crypto community advocates for censorship resistant technology. We look into what might have caused such a coordinated attack and then we look into how we can mitigate another attack using LBRY which is a peer to peer network where you can find content. Finally, we take a look at the performance of the S&P 500 as well as NASDAQ over the past decade.

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41

Summary

Today we go a little deeper in the NFT universe to bring on Joel Hubert and Mark Le, cofounders of Metalith.io. They are bringing the S&P 500 for the NFT space. Their first NFT on their platform is on the topic we tend to talk about a lot - Decentraland. We cover what aspects create value on land and how Metalith will help users understand how well the space is performing. We also discuss possible business models they could use and how the NFT space stretches to cover many aspects from collectibles to playable pieces that can traverse from game to game.

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40

Summary

The reason Hex is getting a lot of attention from the crypto community is because there is a gut instant reaction when the claim is extremely high returns. We’ve seen the promise of high returns before with Bitconnect which officially tanked in January 2018. Many lost a ton of money and a similar risk has been resurrected with Hex. We take a look at the dump that occurred so violently with Matic and we discuss what might have caused it and how this crash correlates with the other Binance IEO tokens. Metalith is an interesting development in the NFT space. It directly impacts how to measure and gauge the sentiment of NFT’s overall with an early and special focus on Decentraland. We break down Metalith and we work on bringing the founders on the podcast. Finally Jack Dorsey unveils that he is working on a decentralized social media standards.

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39

Summary

For the last several weeks, Matic has been on a parabolic bull trend which does not happen frequently. One of the first Initial Exchange Offerings by Binance, its still their best performing IEO. Matic focuses on a sidechain for Ethereum that improves on the scalability and the throughput of the network. While Matic is on this parabolic run, Ethereum just launched Istanbul which reduces the bottle neck and increases the network throughput by 200 transactions per second. A lot of action this week also brought us Hex coin brought to you by Richard Heart. This controversial coin is said to provide you large returns which sends up all kinds of flags. Peter McCormack, host of the popular podcast called What Bitcoin Did, joined a live stream with Richard Hart where mixed reactions resulted. We also received notification of the beta launch of Voice by the Block.One team that utilizes the EOS network.  

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38

Summary

When we first heard of Decentraland, we were automatically hooked. We saw the ingredients of something that could really harness the value of blockchain technology in the form that most new technologies are introduced to the masses; gaming. Participating in the community in various ways, we’re seeing a pattern in the development community that wont lead to a thriving metaverse. We need the leading team in Decentraland to provide and encourage the development community to build recurring experience where a ROI is the centerpiece of the experience. The holiday season is a good time to look back at progress and we discovered some early comments on Bitcoin from people reading Satoshi’s white paper in 2009. With the launch of the controversial Hex coin from Richard Hart, we briefly discuss the proposition it provides and we make a first pass on whether or not its worth your attention. Finally we look at the stock to flow chart compared to Bitcoin’s price and we discuss what might come next for Bitcoin.

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