BitTensor Narrative Shifts to 'Bitcoin of AI'

The protocol's architecture is a network of specialized "subnets," each acting as a competitive marketplace for a specific AI task, from text generation to financial modeling. Miners provide the AI models and computational work within these subnets, while validators rank the quality of their output to determine rewards. Unlike Bitcoin's Proof-of-Work, Bittensor uses a "Proof of Intelligence" consensus mechanism where rewards are proportional to the value and usefulness of the intelligence contributed, as judged by network validators. This system, known as Yuma Consensus, is designed to foster a continuously improving, open-source repository of machine intelligence. The "Bitcoin of AI" comparison is rooted in its tokenomics: a hard cap of 21 million TAO tokens, a scheduled halving of issuance, and a fair launch with no pre-mined tokens or initial VC allocations. The first halving event, which cuts the block reward by 50%, was anticipated around December 2025. The project was co-founded by Jacob Steeves, a former Google engineer. While it had no initial VC funding, major crypto funds like Polychain Capital, Digital Currency Group, and Dao5 later acquired significant positions, with holdings reportedly in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Institutional interest is solidifying through regulated products. Grayscale Investments and Bitwise have both filed with the SEC to offer spot TAO exchange-traded funds (ETFs), which would provide mainstream institutional access to the asset. The network is actively scaling, with plans to potentially double its capacity from 128 to 256 subnets to accommodate more specialized AI markets. This expansion aims to increase the network's economic activity and utility as a foundational layer for decentralized AI applications.