319. TBR - TAP Protocol’s Biggest Upgrade | Tapscope Cross-Chain DEX | NAT to Miners Retrospective (ft. Benny the Dev)

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 still wins. Disclosure: The hosts are founders of NAT.fun and hold positions in assets discussed. Nothing in this episode is financial advice. Watch the full episode on YouTube and subscribe to the newsletter at TheBlockRunner.com.