🕊️ Twitter | 🎙️ Podcasts | 📨 Past Editions 

Welcome to the 28th 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 February 23rd ↘️

Subnet Leaderboard

Highlights of the Week

⚡️ ETHDenver was a huge success for the community! It was so great to see familiar faces and meet the new entrants who are TAO-curious and looking for ways to add value. Here are my brief key takeaways from the panels I heard and conversations I had:

• Go broad or go narrow?: There is a stark difference in opinions when it comes to how builders are approaching Bittensor: building the channels to facilitate the production of multi-faceted commodities that can be leveraged in a myriad of ways versus being the undisputed best at solving for a very specific use case.

  • Broad: Targon (SN4) providing ultra-fast inference.

  • Narrow: NextplaceAI (SN48) providing the most accurate home price estimations.

• dTAO confusion: There is still a lot of confusion around dTAO and how subnet teams should financially and operationally position themselves for the future. Many teams prepared themselves in advance, but others are still scratching their heads.

• Emission customizability: A lot of participants want to see the subnet owners have control over how the emissions are split between themselves, validators, and miners. Some AI use cases are much more computationally intensive than others, and flexibility in determining miner rewards is important in order to attract quality talent.

• Marketing & distribution : A lot of people outside the TAO echo chamber approached me with comments like “TAO is too confusing,” “I never see TAO come up on the timeline,” “can you help fix the narrative, that’s your job!” I personally believe that distribution has gotten better since the launch of dTAO, but other crypto natives don’t believe so. But hey, maybe we don’t need them anyways + I’m workin’ on it!

• Apps apps apps: We clearly need more apps and interfaces that let people touch the intelligence that’s being built here. People wanna use apps, they help with distribution, and none of it feels real until an app pops off, which would prove the case for Bittensor. But I am working on this too 🙂 

• BadEnglishTea is tall: Simply put, the man is tall, and I am sure his Jazz party was sick. Sad I missed it ☹️ 

⚡️ BitGo is expanding their custody solutions to include TAO for self-custody hot wallets, self-custody cold wallets, and qualified custody wallets.

⚡️ τaofu announced the launch of Bittensor's first Launchpad and Tokenization platform, which enables subnet owners to tokenize future emissions into Subnet Shares (SNS) and raise capital without draining their TAO liquidity pools. They also released a piece that explores how diversified financial instruments like SNS tokens can broaden participation and foster growth for Bittensor, expanding its influence across the wider crypto ecosystem.

⚡️ Xavier posted a tweet noting that TAO reserves across subnets have dipped below the protocol's injection levels, likely due to staking pressure lagging behind the gradual reduction in root selling over the weekend. He also announced that the tao.app public beta is now live, with more updates on the way.

⚡️ According to the Dippy team, they’ve surpassed 4 million cumulative users across web, iOS, and Android, emphasizing that companionship represents a major consumer opportunity in AI.

Alpha, Media, & Subnet Updates Below… ⬇️