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 explore the rapid advancements occurring outside of the crypto space, particularly in AI and robotics, and consider how a robotic revolution could shape society. Innovation seems to be accelerating across fields like AI, robotics, and quantum computing, making it increasingly difficult to keep up. Turning the focus back to the crypto world, we reflect on how the current market doesn't mirror this same momentum. With market sentiment at all-time lows, largely due to memecoin saturation and growing awareness of insider manipulation, we discuss potential solutions for emerging from this slump. Among the more promising developments is $NAT, a fundamentally sound asset that we believe points the way forward for the crypto market. Through the lens of Digital Matter Theory, $NAT introduces groundbreaking concepts that bring real substance to the crypto space by utilizing Bitcoin’s properties in the digital asset creation process. In the coming weeks, $NAT will fulfill its ultimate goal: to become Bitcoin’s second official subsidy reward token, setting the stage for a multi-billion dollar market cap. We believe that as awareness of $NAT spreads, it will reinvigorate the community with a renewed sense of purpose—something the market desperately needs right now.
AI Agents thrive on data, and @cookiedotfun is building the ultimate supply. 🍪🤖
We sat down with founder Filip to break down how Cookie is revolutionizing AI with unique data aggregation, powering smarter, more capable agents. Plus, how $COOKIE fits into it all. 🚀
Watch now:
Building AI Infra For The Agentic Economy w/ Filip Wielanier, CEO of Cookie3 | TBR #254 https://youtu.be/89hWvkNvNZ0
@cookiedotfun has been highly regarded for its unique data aggregation methods and application for AI Agents. In a world as competitive as AI, data is the lifeblood that will make Agents more performant than others and therefore more desirable. The Cookie DAO foundation is working toward building a state of the art data system that will supply AI Agents with these necessary knowledge sources. We break down with the founder Filip how Cookie works and how the $cookie tokens play an integral role in supporting this ecosystem. Since the release of Cookie.fun, a tremendous onboarding of users into the Cookie ecosystem has followed due to the platforms ability to parse through on-chain and off-chain information that is relevant to the Agentic space in web3. We ask Filip how he see’s the AI Agent space progressing from here and how Cookie’s data technology will help elevate AI Agent launch platforms give their agents more optimal capabilities, as reflected by their own recently deployed agent swarm supporting Agent Cookie.
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We start by talking about the recent deployment of Agent Cookie and how it is showcasing the utilization of multi-agent swarm technology to more efficiently produce content. We speculate on how these types of swarms can be applied to produce content that can reach a broader demographic outside of crypto twitter, also share our insights on the current state of the AI agent landscape now that the sector is down 70-80% from its all time highs. We then transition to the Bittensor ecosystem and how we think the launch of dTAO will play out. This is a moment we have been waiting to see manifest for over 2 years and if successful gives TAO the potential to be regarded as the ETH of this cycle. However there are several contingencies that have to be considered in regards to the existing market participant demographics and the probability of an original product emergence from within the ecosystem itself.
We break down how important innovation and new narratives are for ecosystems to experience success in the web3 space. We’ve seen ecosystems that have good designs on paper such as Polkadot play out to not meeting the initial expectations set at their launch. We believe the cause of this is due to a lack of innovative products that were deployed that leveraged that ecosystems benefits and unique properties. Bittensor will require the same in order for it to stand out at the end of the day for it to achieve its unicorn status in the crypto AI landscape.
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We break down the state of the Meme economy and make comparisons to what we saw in the 2021 bull cycle. Memes on Solana have strong parallels to the NFT market on Ethereum from last cycle, especially when you compare revenue figures of the top marketplaces like pump.fun to Opensea. We give our thoughts on where we are on the timeline of meme mania and speak about the impacts memes are having on the broader crypto market. This includes methods of launching new projects by leveraging memes as a more user friendly go to market vehicle to onboard community and then adding complexity layers down the road to not off-put sentiment.
Also, when it comes to marketing narratives memes seem to be dominating the mind share so we discuss how we are approaching $NAT from a marketing perspective. Now that $NAT is weeks away from officially becoming Bitcoin’s second subsidy reward coin, how we classify this new coin is important for public perception. Some do not see $NAT as a candidate to fit within the existing market demographic of memes and rather see a new narrative formed around the coin that distinguishes it from the meme asset class due to its technical provenance to DMT and the broader mission of supplying Bitcoin miners with additional subsidy to sustain network security. We discuss our thoughts on this and also the liquidity dilemma when it comes to supporting Bitcoin assets. All sectors of the Bitcoin ecosystem are facing this problem and are actively working toward building solutions that can either bring more liquidity to Bitcoin from other chains or port Bitcoin native assets to other chains like Solana to benefit from those capital markets.
We have a deep dive discussion with the founder of MOSS AI about the conceptual emergence of AGI and how this reality intersects with the web3 economy. Landon is building a crypto ecosystem focused on supporting the emergence of blockchain based AGI. The ecosystem has several layers of technical complexity as well as a multi token approach. Landon explains the purpose and utility for each token and how collectively they align all the facets of the ecosystem together to produce productive AI Agents with highly specified and tuned functional purpose. We break down what the ultimate goal is for the MOSS ecosystem and how AGI will impact humanity at scale. Since Landon has an extensive background in the metaverse space we put our minds together to theory-craft multiple scenarios where productive AGI framework like MOSS can help aid in the construction of a sustainable digital economy. We also get into the sustainability of the AI Agents themself since they have cost requirements similarly to how smart contract execution has cost requirements. All together the MOSS economy is designed to give Agents the possibility of producing valuable output in order to maintain their own sustainable pathways to continue their performance and to eventually partake in the digital and physical economy autonomously.