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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.

211

Summary

As we prepare for the biggest UNAT launch on Mscribe, the rest of the Ordinals community is in Hong Kong preparing to party the night away. We ask the question, should we not be fading these kind of conferences and what actually happens at them? We then get into the L2 discussion brought up by Bitcoin Wizards team on Bankless Podcast. Sentiment around L2’s to Bitcoin seem to be rapidly declining, are they all scams afterall?! We then discuss the upcoming Royals mint and explain why this isn’t like a typical Ordinal collection.

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210

Summary

We recap the events of the last week leading up to what was supposed to be the Redacted launch. After the testing results the Mscribe team felt the need to delay the launch another week to refine the Blockpad experience and address minting issues. We walk through the individual tests and talk about a major debacle we had to overcome. We then discuss the process of Blockpad minting and speculate on the future evolution of it. 

Afterwards we reflect on the previous bear cycle and identify the similarities between then and now. Also, we discuss Bitmap and it’s stagnant state, emphasizing the need for more developers to step in to push the ecosystem forward.

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209

Summary

Will and Iman discuss the current state of crypto markets and the mass delusional state backing the importance of meme culture and the dissolution of utility driven initiatives in web3. Ultimately are meme influencers and tokens hurting the crypto space as a whole? Or is this just a separate sector of importance that has no influence on the progression of web3 innovation and potentially will be used for good to drive more interest and participants toward projects with more substance. 

We then discuss the importance of DMT and non-arbitrary tokens and how they can potentially influence market sentiment given wider adoption. In a market where inspirational innovations are largely lacking, can the idea of Bitcoin data utilization for token generation captivate the minds of the people similar to how early day NFTs did?

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208

Summary

The L2 and DeFi discussion in relation to Bitcoin are perhaps some of the most important ones when determining the future of Bitcoin. It is clear Bitcoin will not be able to scale into the future, regardless of how much robust innovation we add to it through metaprotocol design. 

However, ecosystem contributors such as Sovryn are working diligently to implement some of the cutting edge in Bitcoin scaling technologies to create favorable environments for development. We discuss with a core contributor to Sovryn, Edan Yago, the technical challenges in rolling out this type of infrastructure and break down the comparisons between existing side chains to Bitcoin which do not consider the same trust minimizing components. 

The conversation explores many interesting facets to Bitcoin development and considers the reality of Bitcoin entering into a phase shift that renders all other chains redundant as Bitcoin infinite scalability becomes a reality as rollup technology becomes solidified.

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207

Summary

We speak with our guest Sandman who is a major contributor to the OXBT community and is now working to organize an up and coming Runes PFP project called Bitdogs. Bitdogs is one of the first Ordinal PFP collections to commit to a Rune token distribution once the protocol goes live. We discuss how this project came to be and the intentions behind tying together this new class of fungible token with their non-fungible collection that will be minting soon.

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