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Welcome to the 18th edition of the TAO Times, where we share weekly updates on all of the most important events occurring within the Bittensor ecosystem!

For validators, subnet owners, miners, token holders, & community members.

Here is what happened during the week of December 15th ↘️

TAO Stats

Highlights of the Week

🔥 The Opentensor Foundation announced the deployment of commit-reveal to mainnet, a new mechanism that encrypts validator scores until a future reveal period to prevent validators from copying each other's weights. This system aims to enhance network integrity by ensuring validators must submit original, independent scores rather than simply duplicating successful strategies from other validators. Cheaters begone!

🔥 One of the first Bittensor-powered AI agents was released on Creator Bid this week: AION 5100, which posts cryptic "Terminal Log Entries" from supposed future dates. The token is currently worth ~$9.5 million. It appears that Bittensor folks are starting to get behind the idea of their models and data powering these agents, which I believe will be helpful in capturing mindshare and showcasing the infrastructural capabilities that all of the subnet teams have been building the past year.

🔥 Yuma has launched RedTeam (SN61) in collaboration with General TAO Ventures, focusing on incentivizing ethical hacking for cybersecurity tools where miners submit encrypted solutions that are evaluated in sandbox environments after 24 hours. Points are awarded based on solution quality, with emissions calculated over a 14-day decay period to encourage continuous improvement of detection mechanisms. We recently spoke with Oli from the team over on last week’s TAO Talk episode, as did Mark Jeffrey on the Hashrate Podcast.

🔥 Crucible Labs shared insights on how AI agents represent a growth opportunity for Bittensor, highlighting that subnets can serve as infrastructure by providing agents with data scraping (SN13, SN42), fine-tuning (SN56), and inference (SN4) capabilities at scale. They advise subnet owners to focus on developing agent-friendly tools, APIs, and documentation to capitalize on this expanding market of AI agents that need continuous access to intelligence and digital commodities. Bittensor will be the backend infrastructure that powers the agentic future.

🔥 I published a brief article that provides an overview of Bittensor-adjacent tokens and their functions: $TAOBOT offers ecosystem-wide integration and upcoming dTAO swap features; $MASA focuses on fair AI and Twitter data through SN42/59; $STURDY operates SN10 for yield optimization; $NEURALAI runs SN46 for 3D model generation; $CHAT manages SN40; and $MODE is in testnet and will focus on synthetic data generation. Sometimes it is important to zoom out and see where else there is Bittensor-adjacent value being created.

Ecosystem & Subnet updates below… ⬇️