What happens when intelligence becomes commoditized? open.substack.com/pub/90days…

Ok, I just put together a proper effort post here, so hopefully you read it, but the TL;DR is that TAO hits all the notes you mentioned above. You want a coin that's essential to an AI business, where that business generates real-world value and that value drives back to the coin itself. That's Bittensor. I am going to assume you don't know much about Bittensor beyond the "AI Bitcoin" moniker and start with a brief origin story, since I think it's important and helps illuminate where "AI Bitcoin" came from. The interesting thing about Bitcoin for the Bittensor story is that it figured out how to use a token to bootstrap a decentralized compute network, owned by nobody and accessible to everyone, that to this day is the largest computing network on Earth. Bittensor's founders are AI researchers. They knew how important compute was going to be for building AI, and they set out to build the same thing for intelligence: a decentralized intelligence network, owned by nobody and accessible to everyone. Just as Bitcoin could coordinate a disparate group of people to fight centralized control of money, perhaps a new primitive, Bittensor, could be designed to fight the coming centralized control of intelligence. So they abstracted the Bitcoin incentive system (i.e., spend energy securing the network by solving SHA-256 hashes, get paid in BTC) so it could be applied to a whole new set of problems, all aimed at one goal: mining for intelligence. Mining SHA-256 today on Bitcoin is incredibly difficult, but as a system it's simple and objective. Mining for intelligence is orders of magnitude more complex. It's subjective, so it has to be scored on a gradient (study: Yuma Consensus), and there are multiple components that all need to be mined (compute, data, algorithms, etc.). That's where subnets come in. Each one tackles a piece of the problem. (1) Outside revenue + value to the tokens: It took years and a lot of iteration, but Bittensor is now doing exactly what it set out to do. It's mining intelligence. Compute/inference: ~5 subnets are coordinating GPUs around the world to serve raw compute and inference into the open market. Customers range from retail to enterprise, with the crypto abstracted away entirely. Estimates vary, but I put this group at ~$40-50MM aggregate ARR and scaling fast (for context, think ~200% QoQ and ~50% MoM growth). Training: two subnets are doing SOTA decentralized pre-training right now (SN3 and SN9). SN9 just wrapped up a 100B-parameter run with the highest MFU reported for a distributed pipeline-parallel run. SN3's current run is a 110B-parameter model, the largest decentralized pre-train ever attempted. These teams are past proof of concept and working on scale. And SN120 Affine is post-training Chinese OSS models at SOTA levels. Applied AI: a whole set of subnets incentivize miners to build verticalized models that power real products. Score for computer vision. RedTeam and Bitsec for cybersecurity. Minos for genomics. Yanez for identity and fraud. Trishool for alignment. Vidaio for video compression. I'm missing plenty more. These are real products being used in the wild by enterprises. I'd put this category at $10-20MM ARR, also scaling quickly. For context, 12 months ago I'd have said ARR across the entire network was under $5MM. The TAMs here are massive, and the blue-chip subnets are exiting the pre-revenue stage and entering the scaling-revenue stage right now. Critically, these teams are taking that revenue and buying/burning their tokens. Not because they're altruistic. Because the network makes it the only rational move. Two reasons for this: (1) A subnet pays its miners in its own token, a fixed number of tokens per block. So the only way to grow the supply side (more GPUs, better models, more output) is for the token to go up. If you're a compute subnet and want more capacity, you take your revenue, cover miner COGS plus some margin, and buy your token. Buy pressure on your token becomes a derivative of your compute bill. The token is the production budget. (2) And the chain runs the same game one level up. Subnets compete against one another in a fight for daily $TAO emissions, and the scoreboard is the price of each subnet's alpha token (a clever way to let the broader market instruct the protocol on how to allocate its resources). The winners get a bigger share, and for mature subnets that TAO goes straight into buying their own token off the pool. Fall too far in the ranks and you not only lose out on emissions, you risk being deregistered. So you might astutely point out that revenues < emissions today. That is true, but the trend is our friend. Bittensor is essentially running the Uber playbook, which I would argue a cryptocurrency is tailor-made to do. Use the token, rather than VC funding, to bootstrap supply before the demand exists. Once supply is there, demand scales and the flywheel kicks in: demand up → revenue up → buy+burns → alpha price up → miner rewards up → more/better supply → repeat. The early alpha buyers were the pre-revenue seed/Series A investors. Now we're entering the revenue/scaling era. Although revenue isn't yet covering emissions, as discussed above, it is growing. Meanwhile, the supply side is in its first halving cycle. TAO had its first halving last December, alpha halvings are coming in 2027/28, and the subsidy shrinks on schedule as revenue takes over. I am not speculating here either - a couple of subnets already bring in more from customers than they pay out to miners. Important to mention: to buy and burn its alpha token, a team has to buy TAO first and stake it into the pool that pairs TAO against its token. Every alpha burned leaves TAO behind in the pool. ~2M TAO already sits in those pools, and every subnet token can only trade against TAO. So subnet revenue = TAO buy pressure, mechanically. Speculative investing in subnets = TAO buy pressure. Subnet/miner/validator registrations = TAO buy pressure. Taken to its logical end... TAO is literally an index of all 128 subnets, or in other words, an index of 128 AI startups building on crypto rails. (2) It's cypherpunk: TAO also represents the right ethos for crypto x AI. It leverages a novel crypto primitive to bootstrap networks that coalesce edge compute and edge talent from around the world, coordinate them to produce the real inputs to intelligence (compute, data, algos, etc.), and serve them to anyone, anywhere. A network that serves open, permissionless, decentralized, uncensored intelligence. A true alternative to centralized labs and governments. And because it harnesses the world's edge compute and talent, it can scale in ways the fiat companies just can't. (3) You're still early: The top 3 compute subnets are ~$100MM market caps. The next two are $30-60MM. Promising subnets in other categories are sitting at $10-20MM. There are 128 subnets today and there'll be 256+ down the road. Maybe many more in the future. Bad teams get deregistered and new ones take their place. As the ecosystem grows, so do miner and owner rewards, which pulls in more teams and better talent. There will be fantastic teams launching subnets a year from now that you can buy at $5-10MM or less. CT isn't woke to this. 99% have not bridged over to the native Bittensor chain to participate in this ecosystem. Cross-chain bridges are only just going live. In my mind, this screams opportunity. And that's before you get to TAO itself, the L1/index/launchpad under all of it, sitting at ~$3B. That's comically low. Its 1:1 comp is ETH at ~$327B. 100x with size is viable here. Will follow up with some longer-form sources to check out.