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The Block Runner is your final source for cryptocurrency technology, explanations and news.

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February 7, 2025

Summary

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.

231

Summary

We’ve been building for more than a year now in the Bitcoin ecosystem and are finally at a point where we are able to hone in and lock down our development roadmap in order to finalize our metaverse on Bitcoin vision. Since the beginning days of DMT we have relied on Benny’s developments on the TAP protocol to support critical functionalities. As the TAP protocol continues to evolve, our more metaverse development focused goals now seem much more feasible and a high velocity metaverse economy built on Bitmap, powered by BitmapOS and the TAP protocol. We discuss the difficulties we have faced in this journey so far in developing DMT protocol and now BitmapOS technologies to improve the developer experience for Bitmap builders.

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230

Summary

We begin our podcast talking about some of the drama within the Ordinals community around the disruptive ability for Ordinal collection founders to make alterations to what is and is not part of their collection post mint. This falls in direct opposition to what Ordinal influencers have touted as the killer benefit to owning an Ordinal art piece as opposed to an NFT. The immutability provenance associated to Bitcoin does not seem to be applied in the metaprotocol realm and we discuss exactly why this is and detail how this will be a continued issue and potential FUD vector as the Ordinals market continues forward.

We then go into more details about the NATRIX which we will likely begin LDE within the coming days without a fixed date. We break down what Bitmap is and how the NATRIX is the most true to Bitmap metaverse ecosystem roll out since the inception of Bitmap Theory. Also, we discuss how NATRIX is a showcase demonstration of how to onboard community by utilizing a single Bitmap as a super powerful tool to align community to partake in the construction process of a virtual environment. Also highlighting how the tools developed to make NATRIX a powerhouse demonstration being publicly available for all Bitmap owners to utilize in the future.

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229

Summary

As time goes on the Bitcoin development space continues to bifurcate and segment into separate ecosystems that deploy their own native solutions to Bitcoin’s biggest problem, its lack of programmability. We discuss with Fitzy from the TAP team how the current state of Bitcoin looks with so many emerging meta protocols, L2s, and Fractal chains entering into the equation as a potential viable solution. We contemplate the markets perceptions around the technical need of indexing in support of app development around Bitcoin and also question the merits of new entrants into the meta protocol space.

We also talk about some of the upcoming updates coming to the TAP protocol such as BRC20 support, Blockdrops, DMT data fields, and Bitmap support. Also rundown the history of Benny’s contributions to the Ordinals/Bitcoin ecosystem and highlight the significance of the TTP ecosystem in supporting the application of DMT.

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228

Summary

We are back after a week long pause due to illness spreading around the team. We react to some of the market drama occurring within the Ordinals and DMT space, as well as address some confusions spreading around twitter. We identify the increase in attacks towards our contributions as evidence of market significance and talk about how we are approaching this environment as builders making progress while ignoring the noise. Also, we break down some of the latest updates to DMT such as the new field 4 (block height) introduction through Trac indexing, and explore details about upcoming block drop mechanism release.

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227

Summary

We interview King, one of the pioneer builders in the DMT ecosystem who has an extensive background in NFT and Ordinal artistry. We dive into King’s early inspirations from the Ethereum NFT movement that led to identifying on-chain art on Bitcoin becoming the next major vertical of innovation for crypto artists. This realization gave King the opportunity to spawn an Ordinal collection in the early days where major infrastructure was not being provided yet. From there, the discovery of DMT through Natcats led to one of the more notable periods of DMT ecosystem development surrounding the launch of The Royals collection.

King’s ability to identify major ecosystem dilemmas contributed to the development of Privilege Authority supported by TAP protocol, to tackle some of the early day issues of UNAT minting concentration. Because of this Mscribe was able to leverage this new functionality to create new NAT distribution models such as the Blockpad. We discuss some of the drama that occurred during those development cycles and reflect on the major breakthrough of achievement as a result of this collaboration. To end we discussed the creator mindset as a successful project founder and how to handle ecosystem expansion and community alignment towards higher value goals of production. Also, we discuss what is the major opportunity DMT presents for artists and developers looking to find inspiration once again by working directly with the data substrate layer native to Bitcoin.

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