Into the Bittensor Ecosystem
Crypto has always been exciting for me. There's always new things somewhere that I can learn from. I'm naturally a curious person, I like to ask a lot of dumb questions especially to technical persons to just get a glimpse into their insights & learn from their valuable experiences.
AI is no exception, in fact things are moving at break neck speed with Web2 tech giants constantly improving their models, major applications capitalizing on AI, releasing AI-driven use cases
Canva launched AI tools to allow non-technical artists & creators to easily build interactive experiences & augment their creations with AI
YouTube introduced a new AI tool that allows creators to generate background music for videos
Ride-hailing players like Grab deploying agentic AI to support merchants & driver partners
E-commerce players like Lazada helping to introduce GenAI tools to help sellers with sales, marketing, and customer service
And the list goes on and on. Practical real-world use cases that utilize generative AI & agentic AI to improve workflows have continued to gain adoption from enterprises & retail users alike.
Good thing about these tech is that they're easily accessible—you can find free or low cost solutions everywhere. The benefits highly outweigh the financial costs.
But what people often overlook are the hidden tradeoffs when using these AI products, such as:
Who owns your data?
Can someone else take your idea and create a competing product?
Is the platform secure? Could your data get leaked?
If the platform goes down (like AWS did), could that halt your business? Could customer funds be at risk?
Can you always access your platform? Are you required to verify your ID? If the platform shuts down, do you still own your product or business?
Many more questions (I've talked about this more extensively in my previous article if you haven't read it yet)
Centralized players have the centralized power to make decisions that can (inadvertently) drastically impact your life.
You could argue that it doesn’t matter—maybe you won’t use these tools much, or you trust these companies to act in the users' best interest. That’s fine. You might even want to invest in these AI startups since they’re tapping into massive addressable markets. But the thing is—you can’t. Unless you're at YC or a top VC firm, you don’t get access to these deals.
On the other hand, in Web3 AI, there are many investable AI ecosystems with teams that are working to bring decentralized AI products & services to the users. One of the top investable DeAI ecosystems is @opentensor (Bittensor)
Bittensor: Darwinian AI
Bittensor falls under the category of "Darwinian AI"—the evolution of AI through natural selection. Think of this as Hunger Games but for AI where each subnet has their own hunger game with "miners" as the tribute (or participants).
They compete against each other with their own models & their own data on a performance in a specific task. Only the fittest models (the ones that perform best) are rewarded. Weaker models are replaced or evolve (via training, tweaking, or learning from others). Over time, this leads to a more robust, diverse, and high-performing AI ecosystem.
What's exciting about Bittensor in particular is the competition & incentive mechanism that's design to align incentives between different stakeholders.
I've outlined the challenges that Web3 AI agent teams are facing in the tweet below... tl;dr the current agent tokens are good for speculators & good for teams to utilize as a tool to build hype but it's bad for using the tokens to acquire & retain users, and also bad because it can't be use as incentives to retain talents (devs, founders, etc) especially when price goes down
Bittensor addresses this by using market-driven mechanism that allocates $TAO emissions to the subnets, thereby incentivizing & supporting teams runway.
Market determine which subnets receive more emissions by staking $TAO within those subnets. Once staked, the $TAO convert into Alpha subnet tokens. The more people stake, the more alpha token price go up, the more emissions you'll receive (in the form of alpha tokens)
$TAO follows very similar emission schedule to $BTC with fixed 21 million tokens supply & halving cycle every 4 years (everyday 7,200 $TAO is emitted to subnets).
The first $TAO halving is projected to occur around Jan 5, 2026 with circulating supply reaching 10.5 million tokens.