The AI services cryptocurrency Bittensor (TAO +1.03%) has surged by 111% over the past 30 days as of March 24, propelled by a handful of catalysts. In case you aren’t familiar, Bittensor is a blockchain that hosts a bunch of subnets. Each of those subnets contains pooled computing resources routed from the chain’s miners, which can accomplish specific tasks articulated by the subnet’s owner, for a fee. Each subnet has a different specialization, and there are more than 120 of them so far.
To buy the computing power from a subnet and have it do the advertised work for you, it’s necessary to pay it in Bittensor’s TAO, which is the native token of the chain and the main asset we’re discussing here. TAO itself is similar to Bitcoin in that it’s mined, it experiences regular halvings, and it has a 21 million limit on the token’s supply. Right now, Bittensor’s market cap is about $3.5 billion, whereas Bitcoin’s is $1.4 trillion. So the former certainly has plenty of room to grow despite its recent run.
But as you may have guessed, Bittensor is a very different project than Bitcoin, and its supply-and-demand dynamics, despite appearing mostly the same at the root, are in fact also quite different. With that in mind, the primary catalyst for expanding by more than double was a recent segment on the All-In Podcast, in which investor Chamath Palihapitiya discussed one of Bittensor’s recent technical accomplishments with Nvidia Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang. In short, the network had just completed training Covenant-72B, a 72-billion-parameter open-source large language model (LLM) built by more than 70 different contributors using ordinary internet-connected hardware rather than a centralized data center. Huang appeared impressed and said that centralized and open-source AI platforms are likely complementary to each other rather than in direct competition.
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