About this episode

The episode discusses the TAP protocol's major upgrade and its implications for cross-chain trading and Bitcoin mining.

In Episode 319 of The Block Runner Podcast, hosts William and I-man are joined for a third time by Benny the Dev of Tap and Track. Benny walks through the TAP protocol's largest upgrade since 2023: native time locks, delegations, and HTLC-based cross-chain swaps that work without bridges, all done natively through meta protocols rather than soft L2s. They dig into Tapscope, the new cross-chain DEX, and Benny's take on perpetuals he calls superpositions, isolated collateral arenas that avoid cascading liquidations. He also teases phase two (the full cross-chain trading matrix) and a phase three AI integration. Then a retrospective on routing NAT emissions to Bitcoin miners, now over sixty percent of hashrate with four of the top five pools engaged, why the declining Bitcoin subsidy and security budget is a real long-term problem, and why NAT, built on the bitsfield with a minimal, non-invasive footprint, may be the perfect engineering answer to it. Plus: building ahead of the narrative, the OpenSea lesson, NAT.fun's dual-rail Solana and Bitcoin approach, Tim Sweeney's Team Open and the NFT/gaming revival, and where AI genuinely helps in development versus where human instinct…

People in this episode

Hosts: William, Iman

Guest: Benny the Dev

Topics covered

• TAP protocol upgrade
• cross-chain DEX
• Bitcoin mining
• NAT emissions
• AI integration
• perpetuals
• decentralized finance

Keywords

• TAP protocol
• cross-chain swaps
• NAT emissions
• Bitcoin miners
• AI integration
• decentralized exchange
• perpetuals
• liquidations

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Tap and Track, OpenSea, NAT.fun, Team Open, Bitcoin, Solana

More episodes of The Block Runner Podcast

• 320. TBR - Big Noodle’s DePIN Infra | Decentralized AI Compute | Energy Into Intelligence (ft. SuperFan & Dr. Mien) · June 27, 2026 · 1h 5m
• 318. TBR - The Collectibles Onramp | Bitcoin’s Power Law Problem | BigNoodle Graduates on NAT.fun · June 22, 2026 · 1h 3m

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