Bittensor, Firmly Ranked First in AI: Technology Evolving, Users Fleeing?
Bittensor (TAO) remains the dominant leader in the AI crypto sector with a market cap of $3.43B, accounting for nearly 20% of the total market. Its core innovation is the "Proof of Intelligence" mechanism, which directly rewards high-quality AI model outputs, differentiating it from competitors focused solely on compute or applications.
The project demonstrated strong fundamentals with $43M in real Q1 2026 revenue (non-token incentivized), translating to a P/S ratio of ~20x, which is considered reasonable. A major technical breakthrough came from subnet Templar (SN3), which successfully trained the Covenant-72B model in a fully decentralized manner. This achievement, praised by AI leaders and compared to "modern Folding@home" by NVIDIA's CEO, validated decentralized training at scale using novel solutions like SparseLoCo for communication efficiency and Gauntlet for incentive alignment.
The dTAO mechanism further amplified growth, allowing subnets to issue their own tokens backed by TAO. This created a leveraged feedback loop, driving the total subnet ecosystem to a $1.47B market cap. However, risks include heavy reliance on token subsidies masking true service costs, a lack of commercial moat leading to user attrition if subsidies decrease, and potential overvaluation if reported revenue includes internal ecosystem transactions rather than purely external demand.
marsbit04/11 00:15
