In Episode 320 of The Block Runner Podcast, hosts William, Iman, and TJ are joined by SuperFan and Dr. Mien of BigNoodle, the AI native art platform behind the Heroes collection that launched on the block pad. The guys trace BigNoodle's path from a Bitcoin Amsterdam hackathon and DMT inspired generative art to its next chapter: a decentralized AI compute network.

The core thesis: Bitcoin turns energy into value, and Big Noodle wants to turn that same energy into intelligence. They dig into decentralized physical AI infrastructure, GPU and CPU boxes that aim to cut the cost of inference by as much as ninety percent, and compute as a brand new asset class in a world of data center power shortages and GPU scarcity.

They also cover whether you can plug a frontier scale model into a distributed network, the mining style reward mechanism behind it, and their yield product called Bullion, where epoch based profit share lets you contribute a unit to a compute pool the way you would add to a DeFi pool. Plus why censorship resistant AI matters as the frontier labs start drawing political lines, and the sci fi units they minted for the NAT.fun hackathon.

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.

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.

In Episode 318 of The Block Runner Podcast, hosts William and I-man dig into the booming collectibles wave: Collector Crypt's exploding revenue, twenty five hundred dollar Pokemon packs, and a new SDK that lets anyone build a storefront on top of real-world graded card inventory. They ask why gambling on cardboard might be crypto's next consumer onramp, and where it goes after Pokemon.

Then they unpack Bitcoin's power law: a new analysis that fit only the first six years of price data yet nailed the next decade. What do those assumptions hide, and why is the Coinbase CEO shrugging off quantum risk and the long-term security budget? As the guys put it, when no OG Bitcoiner is concerned, that's concerning.

Finally, they cover BigNoodle graduating on NAT.fun. The AI DePIN project revealed its art, the market reacted instantly, and it previews how Vibe Studio turns market data into a creative compass.

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.