Institution. OTF · Openτensor Foundaτion · Opentensor · Bittensor (official) · Rao Foundation
The institutional voice of Bittensor: the foundation that ran the chain, wrote the docs and the site, and from 2026 signs its pages as the Rao Foundation after handing governance to the chain.
As with other commodities, markets could help us efficiently produce machine intelligence. We propose a market where intelligence is priced by other intelligence systems peer-to-peer across the internet.
9 Mar 2020 · in contextEvery quote is verbatim and dated. The reading above each era is written from the cited quotes only. Numbers link to the quote they cite.
The whitepaper sets the frame that everything later returns to: intelligence as a commodity and a peer-to-peer market where models price each other 001.
marketAs with other commodities, markets could help us efficiently produce machine intelligence. We propose a market where intelligence is priced by other intelligence systems peer-to-peer across the internet.
Abstract of the original whitepaper, BitTensor: A Peer-to-Peer Intelligence Market, as submitted to arXiv (v1) and still hosted on bittensor.com/whitepaper.
The site speaks only to miners, with an install command as its whole message 002, and by 2022 is a wordmark and four links 003. The README defines a market system for the development of AI whose purpose is to democratize the commodity and disrupt a centrally controlled status quo 005 006, under the tagline Internet-scale Neural Networks 004.
marketShift From a paper to a running network; the audience is engineers and miners, and the enemy is named as centralized AI.
BitTensor code chat docs network research Run a Miner $ /bin/bash -c "$( curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/opentensor/bittensor/master/scripts/install.sh )"
The entire visible text of the bittensor.com front page in June 2021: the only call to action is an install command for miners.
Bittensor Learn Whitepaper Network Blog
The entire visible text of the bittensor.com front page in May 2022; the wordmark has changed from BitTensor to Bittensor and there is still no tagline.
Internet-scale Neural Networks
Tagline under the Bittensor wordmark in the README of the v3.0.0 release of the official repository; the same tagline still heads the archived README in 2026.
At Bittensor, we are creating an open, decentralized, peer-to-peer network that functions as a market system for the development of artificial intelligence. Our purpose is not only to accelerate the development of AI by creating an environment optimally condusive to its evolution, but to democratize the global production and use of this valuable commodity.
Opening paragraph of the README of the v3.0.0 release of the official repository.
Our aim is to disrupt the status quo: a system that is centrally controlled, inefficient and unsustainable. In developing the Bittensor API, we are allowing engineers to monetize their work, gain access to machine intelligence and join our community of creative, forward-thinking individuals.
Second paragraph of the v3.0.0 README, naming what the project is against and who it invites.
The first front-page tagline appears, Internet-scale machine learning 007, with four principles: open, incentivized, decentralized, user-governed 008 and the slogan Incentivizing intelligence 009. The docs call the vision a pure market and an incentivized arena 011. Medium begins: fair launch with Bitcoin as precedent 014, the mainnet codenames 015, no VC allocations ever 016, the Charter's opposition to centralized control 017 018, and subnets announced as the way developers write their own markets 013.
marketShift The Foundation starts speaking in the first person as an institution, adopts Bitcoin's fair-launch story, and prepares the word subnet.
Bittensor, Internet-scale machine learning
Page title and tagline of the bittensor.com front page in June 2023, the first capture with a tagline.
Open The protocol is accessible to anyone, anytime, anywhere. Join us and start building. Incentivized TAO serves as both reward for intelligence contributions and access to the network. Decentralized Structural dispersion doesn’t just improve the distribution model, it optimizes training. User-Governed The project is community-driven. Administrative power is relinquished as much as possible.
The four numbered principles on the bittensor.com About page in June 2023.
Incentivizing intelligence.
Two-word line under the network statistics on the bittensor.com About page in June 2023.
Bittensor is an open-source protocol that powers a decentralized, blockchain-based machine learning network. Machine learning models train collaboratively and are rewarded in TAO according to the informational value they offer the collective.
Opening definition on the front page of docs.bittensor.com in June 2023.
Ultimately, our vision is to create a pure market for artificial intelligence, an incentivized arena in which consumers and producers of this valuable commodity can interact in a trustless, open and transparent context.
Vision sentence on the front page of docs.bittensor.com in June 2023.
September is shaping up to be equally, if not more, important as we prepare to release user-created subnets and unleash Bittensor to a broader audience.
Opening of the Foundation's September 2023 network update on Medium, ahead of the subnet launch.
By incentivizing developers to create their own markets, Bittensor is positioning itself to become a one-stop-shop for those seeking all the necessary requirements for building unstoppable applications. … The release of subnets offers the potential to pull these tools into a shared network, making all the ingredients necessary to create intelligence available within one network, governed by one token.
The September 2023 network update describing what user-created subnets would do for developers.
Bittensor’s currency (TAO) is a utility token designed to incentivize the production of machine intelligence. Thus, the team elected to have a fair launch — that is, no pre-mined tokens or ICOs, ensuring each TAO reflected real machine learning work. Just as Bitcoin introduced a decentralized currency free from centralized control, Bittensor promises a future of unbiased, anti-corporate intelligence.
Opening of the Foundation's Medium explainer on the TAO token economy.
In January 2021, the first iteration of the main Bittensor network was launched, codenamed ‘Kusanagi’. … In November 2021, Kusanagi was forked and launched under a new codename: ‘Nakamoto’. On March 20, 2023, Nakamoto was then forked one last time to address a few performance issues in the network’s kernel code - this latest iteration is affectionately named ‘Finney’.
The token economy explainer giving the official names and dates of the three mainnet iterations.
Bittensor has not allocated any tokens to anyone except those who have earned TAO through participation the network. No VC, insider, advisor, etc. has ever been allocated tokens that were not earned on the network. … This will never change.
The token economy explainer answering why the tokenomics are simple.
Bittensor itself cannot have a charter. Its core technology is a consensus mechanism, which reaches agreement about how its preferences should be distributed to participants in an open and un−permissioned network. If it has preferences itself, they are openness and decentralization, which are immutably written into its code.
Preamble of The Bittensor Delegates Charter on bittensor.com, signed by the Opentensor Foundation, in its earliest capture.
We believe that excessive centralization of AI poses the greatest risk to the human race, within or without Bittensor. Concentration of power will inevitably create biased decision−making, controlled access to benefits and significant abuse.
The Charter's first principle, headed Our Counterpoint To Centralized Control.
The README redefines Bittensor as a mining network similar to Bitcoin 019. The November 2023 update is the most combative official text: there is a subnet for that 020, the free market we have built for AI 021, and OpenAI as a bygone era 022. The 2024 site adds Bittensor Explained, which opens with repressive regimes 026, makes digital commodities the noun 027, and lists roles a reader can take 029. The docs fix the vocabulary: subnet as competition market and Yuma Consensus 025 024. The dTAO whitepaper closes the era by calling the root network an apathetic oligarchy and proposing market democracy 032 033.
commodityShift Subnets move from promise to proof; digital commodities replaces machine learning as the noun; the Foundation names OpenAI and, later, its own validators as the problem.
Bittensor is a mining network, similar to Bitcoin, that includes built-in incentives designed to encourage computers to provide access to machine learning models in an efficient and censorship-resistant manner.
Opening definition in the README of v6.0.0, the release that shipped the Revolution upgrade and user-created subnets; the same sentence stayed through v7.0.0 in May 2024.
Do you want to generate images? There is a subnet for that. Would you like to create music with the assistance of AI? There is a subnet for that. How about scraping and indexing the entire internet in under four hours? There is a subnet for that too.
The November 2023 network update, six weeks after subnets opened, reporting 26 registered subnets.
Subnets bring out the very best in all of us: humanity’s most creative ideas, translated to code, brought to life by a distributed network of nodes. … In the free market we have built for AI, the only thing that matters is that nodes produce the best intelligence, as quickly as they can, and at the cheapest possible price.
The November 2023 network update describing what subnets are.
OpenAI is following the playbook of a bygone era, one of technocratic global elitism and corporate war-machines. The Bittensor community stands in direct opposition to this archaic way of thinking — on Bittensor, value is rewarded, not your status.
The November 2023 network update comparing OpenAI Dev Day to Apple product launches.
As an impartial foundation we do not endorse nor recommend any particular subnetwork. … We are on a mission to democratize access to intelligence, to help usher in a new paradigm for the world … Bittensor is nothing without we the people.
Closing section of the November 2023 network update, on the Foundation's role and on community calls for subnet funding.
The Yuma Consensus rewards subnet validators with dividends for producing miner-value evaluations that are in agreement with the subjective evaluations produced by other subnet validators, weighted by stake.
The Yuma Consensus page of the official docs, last edited April 29, 2024, reached through a May 2024 capture.
Each such incentive-based competition market is called a subnet. Subnets constitute the core of the Bittensor ecosystem. … A blockchain that runs the above subnets and supports their proper functioning so that the incentive-based competition market is decentralized, is permissionless and is collusion-resistant, i.e., is resistant to market manipulation.
The Introduction page of the official docs, last edited May 17, 2024, defining the three components of the ecosystem.
There is no greater story than people’s relentless and dogged endeavor to overcome repressive regimes. … centralized firms, markets and authorities are engaged in a never-ending disempowerment of human people’s autonomy. Bittensor is creating a new future for humanity, where new economies and new commodities are decentralized by design and where no single entity is a sole authority.
Opening of the Bittensor Explained page on bittensor.com in June 2024; the same text is served at bittensor.com/intro in September 2026.
At the core of the Bittensor ecosystem is the production, marketing and selling of digital commodities. … Digital commodities like compute, data, storage, predictions, and models are transformed into intelligence.
The Bittensor Explained page defining what the ecosystem does.
Entrepreneurs with skills and ideas will use Bittensor when they are deprived of investments from traditional sources of capital. And most important, any such entrepreneur can participate profitably and thrive in the Bittensor ecosystem.
The Bittensor Explained page naming its audience.
Or, you can be a subnet validator, find markets, enterprises, small-businesses, application developers or end-users, for these digital products, generate revenue and earn TAO. Or you can just be a subnet owner and create fertile grounds for the growth of your subnet validators and subnet miners and earn TAO. Come join us and write your own decentralized economies into existence.
Closing of the Bittensor Explained page listing the roles a reader can take.
Bittensor Community, Contributors, and TAO Holders, Yesterday at 7:41 PM UTC, we took the decision to place the Opentensor Chain Validators behind a firewall and entered safe-mode on Subtensor due to an attack that affected multiple participants in the Bittensor community.
Opening of the Foundation's community update after the July 2, 2024 wallet-draining attack traced to a malicious PyPI package.
In this document, we present Dynamic TAO (DTAO): a market-driven mechanism designed to replace Bittensor’s current emission allocation model. In particular, Dynamic TAO derives emission values from the market prices of subnet-specific tokens that trade against TAO on Constant Product AMMs.
Abstract of the dTAO whitepaper by Yuma Rao, Dr. Nick and 0xcacti, hosted on bittensor.com; the page is undated and is placed in January 2025 from secondary reports of its release, so the date is approximate.
By replacing the current subnet valuation model with an open market, we make the subnet valuation process more efficient, increase coordination costs for malicious participants aiming to manipulate emissions, and eliminate the apathetic oligarchic voting system
The dTAO whitepaper abstract on why validator voting over subnet emissions was replaced.
DTAO represents a fundamental shift towards true market democracy in the valuation of subnets. Where the previous system concentrated power in the hands of a few validators, DTAO opens participation to anyone willing to stake TAO in subnet pools.
Section 2 of the dTAO whitepaper, What is DTAO.
Operationally, we introduce subnet tokens (which we will informally refer to as Alpha1, Alpha2, Alpha3, etc.) through which miners, validators, and subnet owners will earn rewards. In so far as Bittensor enables the decentralized production and distribution of digital commodities, subnet tokens serve as the medium through which the network intelligently values these commodities.
Section 2 of the dTAO whitepaper introducing subnet tokens and the alpha naming.
The official voice becomes the docs: Dynamic TAO is an evolution toward more thorough decentralization that removes the root network's role in judging subnets 036, and the upgrade was passed by Senate vote 037; the glossary adds the Triumvirate and commit reveal 038. The front page carries no tagline through 2025 035.
marketShift Explanation replaces persuasion; the market metaphor is now literal, a pool with a price.
Bittensor Explore DOCS Research SCAN CONNECT
The entire visible text of the bittensor.com front page two days after the dTAO upgrade: a menu and a price ticker, no tagline.
Dynamic TAO is a recent evolution of the integrated tokenomic and governance model that underlies the Bittensor network. It represents a significant step in Bittensor’s trajectory toward more thorough decentralization, by eliminating the centralized role of the root network in judging the value of subnetworks.
Opening of the Core Dynamic TAO Concepts page of the official docs, last edited March 6, 2025.
Dynamic TAO was introduced by proposal, approved by senate vote, and deployed as an upgrade to Bittensor main network on February 13, 2025 after a year of research, development, and testing.
The Dynamic TAO FAQ of the official docs, last edited March 28, 2025, on the rollout.
Bicameral Legislature: A two-tier legislative system comprising the Triumvirate and the Senate for proposal approval. … Commit Reveal: The commit reveal feature is designed to solve the weight-copying problem by giving would-be weight-copiers access only to stale weights.
Two entries from the official docs glossary, last edited May 14, 2025.
Release notes on bittensor.com become the main official prose, in a blunt register: subnet registration is a quiet failure 039, the emission gate collapses the tail 040, TAO is a productive asset with a root proportion 041 and root capital was sterile 042. The front page regains a definition, an open network where independent subnets produce digital commodities 043, the docs move onto bittensor.com 044, and the About page hosts Const's language-for-markets frame under a Rao Foundation byline 045 with a jab at systems falsely self-proclaimed as open 046.
productive assetShift From decentralization talk to yield mechanics; the institution's name on the pages changes to Rao Foundation and the docs move onto bittensor.com.
The cost of registering a subnet has been one of the network’s quietest failures. … a subnet nobody uses still collects a slice of every block, which is to say, the tail of the network dilutes the subnets doing real work.
The V440 upgrade note on bittensor.com, titled The Emission Gate and dated July 2026, explaining the problem it fixes.
Spec 440 changes Bittensor’s emission curve. Emission remains price-based, but prices now pass through a threshold ‘gate’ — an inflection point centered around the 32nd rank. Above the gate, emission is essentially unchanged. Below it, emission collapses toward zero.
The V440 upgrade note describing the change to subnet emission.
TAO is not just a utility token — it is a productive asset. Holding it earns a share of the inflation of all 128 competitively optimized subnets. We call that share root proportion: the fraction of Bittensor’s underlying subnets owed to TAO itself.
Opening of the V441 upgrade note on bittensor.com, titled Root Reborn and dated July 2026.
Nearly half of all TAO in existence sits on root — 73% of all staked TAO. Until now that capital has been sterile, because the chain enforced a bias on how its owed inflation was used: sold into TAO the moment it arrived. This upgrade changes the nature of root yield, from passive to managed.
The V441 upgrade note on why root staking was changed.
Bittensor — decentralized machine intelligence network … Bittensor is an open network where independent subnets produce digital commodities and the chain pays contributors in TAO.
Page title and one-line definition on the live bittensor.com front page, the first front-page tagline since 2023.
Bittensor is a blockchain (the subtensor chain) that coordinates and pays for useful work. … A subnet is an independent incentive market, identified by an integer netuid. … Miners produce the commodity, validators score the miners, subnet creators define the incentive mechanism, and stakers back validators with TAO.
The live docs landing page and its network concepts page on bittensor.com, which replaced docs.bittensor.com.
Bittensor is essentially a language for writing numerous decentralized commodity markets, or ‘subnets’, situated under a unified token system. … By analogy, Bittensor brings the same type of abstraction which Ethereum added to Bitcoin for running decentralized contracts, but onto Bitcoin’s inverse innovation — digital markets.
The Bittensor Paradigm, the live About page of bittensor.com, bylined Const, core dev at Rao Foundation; the 2024 site menu listed a Paradigm page but no capture of it was found.
For front-end customers, Bittensor offers access to resources at a cheaper price and without intermediary; unclosable, not falsely self-proclaimed as “open”.
The Bittensor Paradigm page listing what the network offers customers, contrasting it with systems it calls falsely open.
A brand strategy skeleton turned on the speaker: not what Bittensor's brand is, but what this voice's Bittensor is. Slots with no evidence are left out rather than filled.
What they say it is for, the world it builds, what it stands for.
Bittensor exists to produce machine intelligence through a market: first a peer-to-peer market where models price each other, then a platform where subnets produce digital commodities and the chain pays contributors in TAO.
As with other commodities, markets could help us efficiently produce machine intelligence. We propose a market where intelligence is priced by other intelligence systems peer-to-peer across the internet.
Bittensor is an open-source protocol that powers a decentralized, blockchain-based machine learning network. Machine learning models train collaboratively and are rewarded in TAO according to the informational value they offer the collective.
Bittensor — decentralized machine intelligence network … Bittensor is an open network where independent subnets produce digital commodities and the chain pays contributors in TAO.
At Bittensor, we are creating an open, decentralized, peer-to-peer network that functions as a market system for the development of artificial intelligence. Our purpose is not only to accelerate the development of AI by creating an environment optimally condusive to its evolution, but to democratize the global production and use of this valuable commodity.
Bittensor is a mining network, similar to Bitcoin, that includes built-in incentives designed to encourage computers to provide access to machine learning models in an efficient and censorship-resistant manner.
At the core of the Bittensor ecosystem is the production, marketing and selling of digital commodities. … Digital commodities like compute, data, storage, predictions, and models are transformed into intelligence.
A future where economies and commodities are decentralized by design, no single entity is a sole authority, and the ownership of machine intelligence sits with ordinary people, bottom up.
Ultimately, our vision is to create a pure market for artificial intelligence, an incentivized arena in which consumers and producers of this valuable commodity can interact in a trustless, open and transparent context.
There is no greater story than people’s relentless and dogged endeavor to overcome repressive regimes. … centralized firms, markets and authorities are engaged in a never-ending disempowerment of human people’s autonomy. Bittensor is creating a new future for humanity, where new economies and new commodities are decentralized by design and where no single entity is a sole authority.
Subnets bring out the very best in all of us: humanity’s most creative ideas, translated to code, brought to life by a distributed network of nodes. … In the free market we have built for AI, the only thing that matters is that nodes produce the best intelligence, as quickly as they can, and at the cheapest possible price.
At Bittensor, we are creating an open, decentralized, peer-to-peer network that functions as a market system for the development of artificial intelligence. Our purpose is not only to accelerate the development of AI by creating an environment optimally condusive to its evolution, but to democratize the global production and use of this valuable commodity.
Openness and decentralization are said to be written into the code; the Foundation adds fair launch with no pre-mine or VC allocation, open source as a moral imperative, and giving power away.
Open The protocol is accessible to anyone, anytime, anywhere. Join us and start building. Incentivized TAO serves as both reward for intelligence contributions and access to the network. Decentralized Structural dispersion doesn’t just improve the distribution model, it optimizes training. User-Governed The project is community-driven. Administrative power is relinquished as much as possible.
Bittensor’s currency (TAO) is a utility token designed to incentivize the production of machine intelligence. Thus, the team elected to have a fair launch — that is, no pre-mined tokens or ICOs, ensuring each TAO reflected real machine learning work. Just as Bitcoin introduced a decentralized currency free from centralized control, Bittensor promises a future of unbiased, anti-corporate intelligence.
Bittensor has not allocated any tokens to anyone except those who have earned TAO through participation the network. No VC, insider, advisor, etc. has ever been allocated tokens that were not earned on the network. … This will never change.
Bittensor itself cannot have a charter. Its core technology is a consensus mechanism, which reaches agreement about how its preferences should be distributed to participants in an open and un−permissioned network. If it has preferences itself, they are openness and decentralization, which are immutably written into its code.
DTAO represents a fundamental shift towards true market democracy in the valuation of subnets. Where the previous system concentrated power in the hands of a few validators, DTAO opens participation to anyone willing to stake TAO in subnet pools.
OpenAI is following the playbook of a bygone era, one of technocratic global elitism and corporate war-machines. The Bittensor community stands in direct opposition to this archaic way of thinking — on Bittensor, value is rewarded, not your status.
Dynamic TAO is a recent evolution of the integrated tokenomic and governance model that underlies the Bittensor network. It represents a significant step in Bittensor’s trajectory toward more thorough decentralization, by eliminating the centralized role of the root network in judging the value of subnetworks.
What is broken that Bittensor answers, in their telling.
Centralized firms and authorities disempower people; OpenAI is cast as the playbook of a bygone era of technocratic elitism.
There is no greater story than people’s relentless and dogged endeavor to overcome repressive regimes. … centralized firms, markets and authorities are engaged in a never-ending disempowerment of human people’s autonomy. Bittensor is creating a new future for humanity, where new economies and new commodities are decentralized by design and where no single entity is a sole authority.
OpenAI is following the playbook of a bygone era, one of technocratic global elitism and corporate war-machines. The Bittensor community stands in direct opposition to this archaic way of thinking — on Bittensor, value is rewarded, not your status.
We believe that excessive centralization of AI poses the greatest risk to the human race, within or without Bittensor. Concentration of power will inevitably create biased decision−making, controlled access to benefits and significant abuse.
The existing AI system is centrally controlled, inefficient and unsustainable, and builders without access to traditional capital have nowhere to go.
Our aim is to disrupt the status quo: a system that is centrally controlled, inefficient and unsustainable. In developing the Bittensor API, we are allowing engineers to monetize their work, gain access to machine intelligence and join our community of creative, forward-thinking individuals.
Entrepreneurs with skills and ideas will use Bittensor when they are deprived of investments from traditional sources of capital. And most important, any such entrepreneur can participate profitably and thrive in the Bittensor ecosystem.
Concentrated control of AI is named the greatest risk to humanity; inside the network, the risks named are validator oligarchy over emissions and, by 2026, idle subnets diluting the ones doing real work.
We believe that excessive centralization of AI poses the greatest risk to the human race, within or without Bittensor. Concentration of power will inevitably create biased decision−making, controlled access to benefits and significant abuse.
By replacing the current subnet valuation model with an open market, we make the subnet valuation process more efficient, increase coordination costs for malicious participants aiming to manipulate emissions, and eliminate the apathetic oligarchic voting system
The cost of registering a subnet has been one of the network’s quietest failures. … a subnet nobody uses still collects a slice of every block, which is to say, the tail of the network dilutes the subnets doing real work.
Nearly half of all TAO in existence sits on root — 73% of all staked TAO. Until now that capital has been sterile, because the chain enforced a bias on how its owed inflation was used: sold into TAO the moment it arrived. This upgrade changes the nature of root yield, from passive to managed.
The tailwinds they cite.
The opening of user-created subnets in 2023 is presented as the moment Bittensor reaches a broader audience.
September is shaping up to be equally, if not more, important as we prepare to release user-created subnets and unleash Bittensor to a broader audience.
Who they talk to and what they tell them.
Miners first (2021), then engineers and open-source developers writing their own markets, then entrepreneurs, validators, subnet owners and stakers; each is told what they can earn.
BitTensor code chat docs network research Run a Miner $ /bin/bash -c "$( curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/opentensor/bittensor/master/scripts/install.sh )"
Our aim is to disrupt the status quo: a system that is centrally controlled, inefficient and unsustainable. In developing the Bittensor API, we are allowing engineers to monetize their work, gain access to machine intelligence and join our community of creative, forward-thinking individuals.
Entrepreneurs with skills and ideas will use Bittensor when they are deprived of investments from traditional sources of capital. And most important, any such entrepreneur can participate profitably and thrive in the Bittensor ecosystem.
Or, you can be a subnet validator, find markets, enterprises, small-businesses, application developers or end-users, for these digital products, generate revenue and earn TAO. Or you can just be a subnet owner and create fertile grounds for the growth of your subnet validators and subnet miners and earn TAO. Come join us and write your own decentralized economies into existence.
Bittensor is a blockchain (the subtensor chain) that coordinates and pays for useful work. … A subnet is an independent incentive market, identified by an integer netuid. … Miners produce the commodity, validators score the miners, subnet creators define the incentive mechanism, and stakers back validators with TAO.
September is shaping up to be equally, if not more, important as we prepare to release user-created subnets and unleash Bittensor to a broader audience.
Bittensor Community, Contributors, and TAO Holders, Yesterday at 7:41 PM UTC, we took the decision to place the Opentensor Chain Validators behind a firewall and entered safe-mode on Subtensor due to an attack that affected multiple participants in the Bittensor community.
What they set it against.
Against centrally controlled AI, OpenAI's corporate playbook, governments and corporations controlling AI, VC token allocations, and the validator oligarchy of its own root network.
Our aim is to disrupt the status quo: a system that is centrally controlled, inefficient and unsustainable. In developing the Bittensor API, we are allowing engineers to monetize their work, gain access to machine intelligence and join our community of creative, forward-thinking individuals.
OpenAI is following the playbook of a bygone era, one of technocratic global elitism and corporate war-machines. The Bittensor community stands in direct opposition to this archaic way of thinking — on Bittensor, value is rewarded, not your status.
Bittensor has not allocated any tokens to anyone except those who have earned TAO through participation the network. No VC, insider, advisor, etc. has ever been allocated tokens that were not earned on the network. … This will never change.
We believe that excessive centralization of AI poses the greatest risk to the human race, within or without Bittensor. Concentration of power will inevitably create biased decision−making, controlled access to benefits and significant abuse.
By replacing the current subnet valuation model with an open market, we make the subnet valuation process more efficient, increase coordination costs for malicious participants aiming to manipulate emissions, and eliminate the apathetic oligarchic voting system
For front-end customers, Bittensor offers access to resources at a cheaper price and without intermediary; unclosable, not falsely self-proclaimed as “open”.
Entrepreneurs with skills and ideas will use Bittensor when they are deprived of investments from traditional sources of capital. And most important, any such entrepreneur can participate profitably and thrive in the Bittensor ecosystem.
Category frame, differentiator, reason to believe.
The category moves from a peer-to-peer intelligence market, to internet-scale machine learning, to a mining network similar to Bitcoin, to a platform of decentralized commodity markets, to a language for writing markets and a decentralized machine intelligence network.
As with other commodities, markets could help us efficiently produce machine intelligence. We propose a market where intelligence is priced by other intelligence systems peer-to-peer across the internet.
At Bittensor, we are creating an open, decentralized, peer-to-peer network that functions as a market system for the development of artificial intelligence. Our purpose is not only to accelerate the development of AI by creating an environment optimally condusive to its evolution, but to democratize the global production and use of this valuable commodity.
Bittensor is a mining network, similar to Bitcoin, that includes built-in incentives designed to encourage computers to provide access to machine learning models in an efficient and censorship-resistant manner.
At the core of the Bittensor ecosystem is the production, marketing and selling of digital commodities. … Digital commodities like compute, data, storage, predictions, and models are transformed into intelligence.
Bittensor is essentially a language for writing numerous decentralized commodity markets, or ‘subnets’, situated under a unified token system. … By analogy, Bittensor brings the same type of abstraction which Ethereum added to Bitcoin for running decentralized contracts, but onto Bitcoin’s inverse innovation — digital markets.
Bittensor — decentralized machine intelligence network … Bittensor is an open network where independent subnets produce digital commodities and the chain pays contributors in TAO.
Bittensor is an open-source protocol that powers a decentralized, blockchain-based machine learning network. Machine learning models train collaboratively and are rewarded in TAO according to the informational value they offer the collective.
Ultimately, our vision is to create a pure market for artificial intelligence, an incentivized arena in which consumers and producers of this valuable commodity can interact in a trustless, open and transparent context.
Bittensor’s currency (TAO) is a utility token designed to incentivize the production of machine intelligence. Thus, the team elected to have a fair launch — that is, no pre-mined tokens or ICOs, ensuring each TAO reflected real machine learning work. Just as Bitcoin introduced a decentralized currency free from centralized control, Bittensor promises a future of unbiased, anti-corporate intelligence.
Subnets bring out the very best in all of us: humanity’s most creative ideas, translated to code, brought to life by a distributed network of nodes. … In the free market we have built for AI, the only thing that matters is that nodes produce the best intelligence, as quickly as they can, and at the cheapest possible price.
TAO is not just a utility token — it is a productive asset. Holding it earns a share of the inflation of all 128 competitively optimized subnets. We call that share root proportion: the fraction of Bittensor’s underlying subnets owed to TAO itself.
Bittensor is a blockchain (the subtensor chain) that coordinates and pays for useful work. … A subnet is an independent incentive market, identified by an integer netuid. … Miners produce the commodity, validators score the miners, subnet creators define the incentive mechanism, and stakers back validators with TAO.
The network only measures outputs and is agnostic to where they come from; subnets are permissionless, collusion-resistant competition markets under one token, and dTAO opens subnet valuation to anyone who stakes.
By incentivizing developers to create their own markets, Bittensor is positioning itself to become a one-stop-shop for those seeking all the necessary requirements for building unstoppable applications. … The release of subnets offers the potential to pull these tools into a shared network, making all the ingredients necessary to create intelligence available within one network, governed by one token.
Each such incentive-based competition market is called a subnet. Subnets constitute the core of the Bittensor ecosystem. … A blockchain that runs the above subnets and supports their proper functioning so that the incentive-based competition market is decentralized, is permissionless and is collusion-resistant, i.e., is resistant to market manipulation.
DTAO represents a fundamental shift towards true market democracy in the valuation of subnets. Where the previous system concentrated power in the hands of a few validators, DTAO opens participation to anyone willing to stake TAO in subnet pools.
Bittensor is essentially a language for writing numerous decentralized commodity markets, or ‘subnets’, situated under a unified token system. … By analogy, Bittensor brings the same type of abstraction which Ethereum added to Bitcoin for running decentralized contracts, but onto Bitcoin’s inverse innovation — digital markets.
Open The protocol is accessible to anyone, anytime, anywhere. Join us and start building. Incentivized TAO serves as both reward for intelligence contributions and access to the network. Decentralized Structural dispersion doesn’t just improve the distribution model, it optimizes training. User-Governed The project is community-driven. Administrative power is relinquished as much as possible.
Peers are paid for information-theoretic value; validators earn only by agreeing with stake-weighted consensus; under dTAO, market prices rather than validator votes decide emission.
The Yuma Consensus rewards subnet validators with dividends for producing miner-value evaluations that are in agreement with the subjective evaluations produced by other subnet validators, weighted by stake.
In this document, we present Dynamic TAO (DTAO): a market-driven mechanism designed to replace Bittensor’s current emission allocation model. In particular, Dynamic TAO derives emission values from the market prices of subnet-specific tokens that trade against TAO on Constant Product AMMs.
Operationally, we introduce subnet tokens (which we will informally refer to as Alpha1, Alpha2, Alpha3, etc.) through which miners, validators, and subnet owners will earn rewards. In so far as Bittensor enables the decentralized production and distribution of digital commodities, subnet tokens serve as the medium through which the network intelligently values these commodities.
Dynamic TAO is a recent evolution of the integrated tokenomic and governance model that underlies the Bittensor network. It represents a significant step in Bittensor’s trajectory toward more thorough decentralization, by eliminating the centralized role of the root network in judging the value of subnetworks.
The benefit they claim, the feeling they sell, what joining says about you.
Cheaper access to intelligence and digital resources without intermediaries, rewards for producing commodities, and from 2026 a managed yield on TAO held on root.
By incentivizing developers to create their own markets, Bittensor is positioning itself to become a one-stop-shop for those seeking all the necessary requirements for building unstoppable applications. … The release of subnets offers the potential to pull these tools into a shared network, making all the ingredients necessary to create intelligence available within one network, governed by one token.
For front-end customers, Bittensor offers access to resources at a cheaper price and without intermediary; unclosable, not falsely self-proclaimed as “open”.
TAO is not just a utility token — it is a productive asset. Holding it earns a share of the inflation of all 128 competitively optimized subnets. We call that share root proportion: the fraction of Bittensor’s underlying subnets owed to TAO itself.
Spec 440 changes Bittensor’s emission curve. Emission remains price-based, but prices now pass through a threshold ‘gate’ — an inflection point centered around the 32nd rank. Above the gate, emission is essentially unchanged. Below it, emission collapses toward zero.
Or, you can be a subnet validator, find markets, enterprises, small-businesses, application developers or end-users, for these digital products, generate revenue and earn TAO. Or you can just be a subnet owner and create fertile grounds for the growth of your subnet validators and subnet miners and earn TAO. Come join us and write your own decentralized economies into existence.
By replacing the current subnet valuation model with an open market, we make the subnet valuation process more efficient, increase coordination costs for malicious participants aiming to manipulate emissions, and eliminate the apathetic oligarchic voting system
The network is sold as humanity's creativity brought to life by nodes that need not know each other, and as a new future for humanity against repressive control.
Subnets bring out the very best in all of us: humanity’s most creative ideas, translated to code, brought to life by a distributed network of nodes. … In the free market we have built for AI, the only thing that matters is that nodes produce the best intelligence, as quickly as they can, and at the cheapest possible price.
There is no greater story than people’s relentless and dogged endeavor to overcome repressive regimes. … centralized firms, markets and authorities are engaged in a never-ending disempowerment of human people’s autonomy. Bittensor is creating a new future for humanity, where new economies and new commodities are decentralized by design and where no single entity is a sole authority.
Joining means being a creative, forward-thinking individual who writes their own decentralized economy into existence.
Our aim is to disrupt the status quo: a system that is centrally controlled, inefficient and unsustainable. In developing the Bittensor API, we are allowing engineers to monetize their work, gain access to machine intelligence and join our community of creative, forward-thinking individuals.
Or, you can be a subnet validator, find markets, enterprises, small-businesses, application developers or end-users, for these digital products, generate revenue and earn TAO. Or you can just be a subnet owner and create fertile grounds for the growth of your subnet validators and subnet miners and earn TAO. Come join us and write your own decentralized economies into existence.
The line they repeat and the proof they point to.
The repeated lines are Internet-scale Neural Networks (2022 to 2026 in the README), Internet-scale machine learning (2023 site), democratize access to intelligence (2023 Medium), and in 2026 decentralized machine intelligence network.
Internet-scale Neural Networks
Bittensor, Internet-scale machine learning
Incentivizing intelligence.
As an impartial foundation we do not endorse nor recommend any particular subnetwork. … We are on a mission to democratize access to intelligence, to help usher in a new paradigm for the world … Bittensor is nothing without we the people.
There is no greater story than people’s relentless and dogged endeavor to overcome repressive regimes. … centralized firms, markets and authorities are engaged in a never-ending disempowerment of human people’s autonomy. Bittensor is creating a new future for humanity, where new economies and new commodities are decentralized by design and where no single entity is a sole authority.
Bittensor — decentralized machine intelligence network … Bittensor is an open network where independent subnets produce digital commodities and the chain pays contributors in TAO.
As with other commodities, markets could help us efficiently produce machine intelligence. We propose a market where intelligence is priced by other intelligence systems peer-to-peer across the internet.
Fair launch with no allocations, a block every 12 seconds, 26 subnets registered in the first month, dTAO passed by Senate vote, and in 2026 the share of TAO staked on root.
Bittensor’s currency (TAO) is a utility token designed to incentivize the production of machine intelligence. Thus, the team elected to have a fair launch — that is, no pre-mined tokens or ICOs, ensuring each TAO reflected real machine learning work. Just as Bitcoin introduced a decentralized currency free from centralized control, Bittensor promises a future of unbiased, anti-corporate intelligence.
Bittensor has not allocated any tokens to anyone except those who have earned TAO through participation the network. No VC, insider, advisor, etc. has ever been allocated tokens that were not earned on the network. … This will never change.
Do you want to generate images? There is a subnet for that. Would you like to create music with the assistance of AI? There is a subnet for that. How about scraping and indexing the entire internet in under four hours? There is a subnet for that too.
Dynamic TAO was introduced by proposal, approved by senate vote, and deployed as an upgrade to Bittensor main network on February 13, 2025 after a year of research, development, and testing.
Nearly half of all TAO in existence sits on root — 73% of all staked TAO. Until now that capital has been sterile, because the chain enforced a bias on how its owed inflation was used: sold into TAO the moment it arrived. This upgrade changes the nature of root yield, from passive to managed.
In January 2021, the first iteration of the main Bittensor network was launched, codenamed ‘Kusanagi’. … In November 2021, Kusanagi was forked and launched under a new codename: ‘Nakamoto’. On March 20, 2023, Nakamoto was then forked one last time to address a few performance issues in the network’s kernel code - this latest iteration is affectionately named ‘Finney’.
Register more than claim.
The register moves from a bare install command, to salutations addressed to Community, Contributors, and TAO Holders, to Charter aphorisms, to release notes that call the network's own design a failure.
BitTensor code chat docs network research Run a Miner $ /bin/bash -c "$( curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/opentensor/bittensor/master/scripts/install.sh )"
Bittensor itself cannot have a charter. Its core technology is a consensus mechanism, which reaches agreement about how its preferences should be distributed to participants in an open and un−permissioned network. If it has preferences itself, they are openness and decentralization, which are immutably written into its code.
Do you want to generate images? There is a subnet for that. Would you like to create music with the assistance of AI? There is a subnet for that. How about scraping and indexing the entire internet in under four hours? There is a subnet for that too.
Bittensor Community, Contributors, and TAO Holders, Yesterday at 7:41 PM UTC, we took the decision to place the Opentensor Chain Validators behind a firewall and entered safe-mode on Subtensor due to an attack that affected multiple participants in the Bittensor community.
The cost of registering a subnet has been one of the network’s quietest failures. … a subnet nobody uses still collects a slice of every block, which is to say, the tail of the network dilutes the subnets doing real work.
Bittensor Learn Whitepaper Network Blog
As an impartial foundation we do not endorse nor recommend any particular subnetwork. … We are on a mission to democratize access to intelligence, to help usher in a new paradigm for the world … Bittensor is nothing without we the people.
Bittensor Explore DOCS Research SCAN CONNECT
How they describe their own relation to it.
The Foundation describes itself as impartial, relinquishing administrative power, not endorsing subnets, and not engaging exchanges; it also ran the chain validators and firewalled the network in July 2024, and by 2026 its pages carry the Rao Foundation name.
Open The protocol is accessible to anyone, anytime, anywhere. Join us and start building. Incentivized TAO serves as both reward for intelligence contributions and access to the network. Decentralized Structural dispersion doesn’t just improve the distribution model, it optimizes training. User-Governed The project is community-driven. Administrative power is relinquished as much as possible.
As an impartial foundation we do not endorse nor recommend any particular subnetwork. … We are on a mission to democratize access to intelligence, to help usher in a new paradigm for the world … Bittensor is nothing without we the people.
Bittensor itself cannot have a charter. Its core technology is a consensus mechanism, which reaches agreement about how its preferences should be distributed to participants in an open and un−permissioned network. If it has preferences itself, they are openness and decentralization, which are immutably written into its code.
Bittensor Community, Contributors, and TAO Holders, Yesterday at 7:41 PM UTC, we took the decision to place the Opentensor Chain Validators behind a firewall and entered safe-mode on Subtensor due to an attack that affected multiple participants in the Bittensor community.
Dynamic TAO was introduced by proposal, approved by senate vote, and deployed as an upgrade to Bittensor main network on February 13, 2025 after a year of research, development, and testing.
What they call things, and refuse to call them.
Official coinages, dated to their earliest reached source: Internet-scale Neural Networks, Kusanagi, Nakamoto, Finney, subnet, subtensor, Yuma Consensus, digital commodities, Dynamic TAO, alpha token, subnet pools, Triumvirate, emission gate, root proportion, beta.
Internet-scale Neural Networks
In January 2021, the first iteration of the main Bittensor network was launched, codenamed ‘Kusanagi’. … In November 2021, Kusanagi was forked and launched under a new codename: ‘Nakamoto’. On March 20, 2023, Nakamoto was then forked one last time to address a few performance issues in the network’s kernel code - this latest iteration is affectionately named ‘Finney’.
The Yuma Consensus rewards subnet validators with dividends for producing miner-value evaluations that are in agreement with the subjective evaluations produced by other subnet validators, weighted by stake.
Each such incentive-based competition market is called a subnet. Subnets constitute the core of the Bittensor ecosystem. … A blockchain that runs the above subnets and supports their proper functioning so that the incentive-based competition market is decentralized, is permissionless and is collusion-resistant, i.e., is resistant to market manipulation.
At the core of the Bittensor ecosystem is the production, marketing and selling of digital commodities. … Digital commodities like compute, data, storage, predictions, and models are transformed into intelligence.
In this document, we present Dynamic TAO (DTAO): a market-driven mechanism designed to replace Bittensor’s current emission allocation model. In particular, Dynamic TAO derives emission values from the market prices of subnet-specific tokens that trade against TAO on Constant Product AMMs.
Operationally, we introduce subnet tokens (which we will informally refer to as Alpha1, Alpha2, Alpha3, etc.) through which miners, validators, and subnet owners will earn rewards. In so far as Bittensor enables the decentralized production and distribution of digital commodities, subnet tokens serve as the medium through which the network intelligently values these commodities.
Bicameral Legislature: A two-tier legislative system comprising the Triumvirate and the Senate for proposal approval. … Commit Reveal: The commit reveal feature is designed to solve the weight-copying problem by giving would-be weight-copiers access only to stale weights.
Spec 440 changes Bittensor’s emission curve. Emission remains price-based, but prices now pass through a threshold ‘gate’ — an inflection point centered around the 32nd rank. Above the gate, emission is essentially unchanged. Below it, emission collapses toward zero.
TAO is not just a utility token — it is a productive asset. Holding it earns a share of the inflation of all 128 competitively optimized subnets. We call that share root proportion: the fraction of Bittensor’s underlying subnets owed to TAO itself.
Bittensor Learn Whitepaper Network Blog
Bittensor, Internet-scale machine learning
Incentivizing intelligence.
By incentivizing developers to create their own markets, Bittensor is positioning itself to become a one-stop-shop for those seeking all the necessary requirements for building unstoppable applications. … The release of subnets offers the potential to pull these tools into a shared network, making all the ingredients necessary to create intelligence available within one network, governed by one token.
Dynamic TAO is a recent evolution of the integrated tokenomic and governance model that underlies the Bittensor network. It represents a significant step in Bittensor’s trajectory toward more thorough decentralization, by eliminating the centralized role of the root network in judging the value of subnetworks.
Bittensor is a blockchain (the subtensor chain) that coordinates and pays for useful work. … A subnet is an independent incentive market, identified by an integer netuid. … Miners produce the commodity, validators score the miners, subnet creators define the incentive mechanism, and stakers back validators with TAO.
Bittensor is essentially a language for writing numerous decentralized commodity markets, or ‘subnets’, situated under a unified token system. … By analogy, Bittensor brings the same type of abstraction which Ethereum added to Bitcoin for running decentralized contracts, but onto Bitcoin’s inverse innovation — digital markets.
Who they agree with, borrow from, or argue against, with the quote that shows it.
No quote about a particular subnet on record.
Public appearances on the record, whether or not a quote was taken.
Something wrong or missing? Quotes are corrected as they arrive; a misattribution is removed first and argued after. How to file one · GitHub issue