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 interview one of the key contributors and developers to ICP and dive deep into the weeds of the Internet Computer. We discuss the need for meta protocol assistance to make assets native to Bitcoin Layer 1 more functional. By using technology native to the ICP stack, developers on Bitcoin L1 can write container functions that call to the Bitcoin side to manipulate UTXO’s without having to bridge assets over. This is a major development for the TAP ecosystem which has recently announced an integration with ICP. Once developers building on TAP begin to use the tools available to leverage ICP for their apps, a new season of interesting opportunity will emerge for Bitcoin and ICP.
Recent events have caused a tremendous rift in Bitcoin’s macro economic position in time. With Donald Trump’s failed assassination attempt came a tremendous uprise in Bitcoin price which is a result of sentiment growth due to a Trump second term increasing in likelihood. We discuss the speculation around Bitcoin becoming a reserve asset for the United States and how this will impact the future of the crypto industry. Also, will the ideas discussed in SoftWar apply after an official government endorsement from the Trump cabinet furthering the demand to acquire and position positively within the Bitcoin network from a nation state perspective. We then react to Casey Rodarmor’s latest mention of DMT protocol and the negative statements his team has to it.
We spent some time with Stan and Chris from the DMT-Natfrogs team to discuss the origins of the collection and re-explore the chaotic early days of UNAT minting. They explain how NatFrogs started as a dead mint but transitioned into a community takeover which has made it one of the more appreciated and valued collections in the DMT UNAT market. We explore what makes DMT truly unique for artists and creators and how the Natfrog team intends to expand their ecosystem moving forward. Also, we dive into the next project of focus in NatFlyers, which aims to bring physical products to UNAT holders. In this case, a variety of UNIQUE pepe themed sneakers will be distributed in an upcoming Mscribe BlockPad on July 10th. Holders of this asset will have the ability to purchase a real world version of the sneaker unique to the parent digital version they own. This can open a massive new market for DMT phygitial products into the future.
MDV has created and is launching one of the more profound UNAT collections DMT has seen yet. DMT-VESSELS is the first DMT UNAT collection that uses 3D Generative Art to bring Bitcoin’s blockchain data to life in a magnificent way. The collection showcases the immense potential when using Bitcoin block information in the generative creation process. Below are features of the collection that make it notable. We discuss with the creator his origins in the Ordinals space and his affinity toward leveraging on-chain Bitcoin data in his creative process even before DMT became standard. Also, we discuss his interpretation of the metaverse and how 3D art will play into it, along with details around the existing art metas of today and how future experimentation can take on-chain art into a new and fresh direction.
We have an insanely insightful conversation with Bob Bodily PhD, Founder of Bioniq, an NFT/Ordinals marketplace built using ICP to amplify the user experience beyond anything that can exist natively to Bitcoin L1. We discuss the current state of Bitcoin ecosystem affairs with Runes and Ordinals, as well as talk about the many metaprotocols developing on top of Bitcoin L1. We then discuss TAP Protocol’s most recent announcement to partner with ICP in order to bring Bitcoin native assets to EVM/ICP smart contract environments. This will amplify the ability for developers to make cool stuff using Bitcoin and introduce new ways to improve the overall UX for users. We also discuss the differing approaches to scaling the developments happening on Bitcoin from L2s, to sidechains, to BitVM and OP_cat.