Bittensor: Bridging AI and Crypto, Luring Venture Capital Investment

Amidst the burgeoning field of artificial intelligence (AI) adoption in crypto, Bittensor, a decentralized AI marketplace, has emerged as a beacon for venture capital giants. Polychain, Digital Currency Group, and dao5 have invested substantial sums in Bittensor's token, TAO, which fuels an array of AI-related services offered by the network. Notably, Binance and Crypto.com's recent listing of TAO has boosted its accessibility and propelled Bittensor's market cap to nearly $3.7 billion.

Bittensor: Bridging the Nexus of AI and Crypto, Attracting Prominent Venture Capital Backing

Amidst the transformative era of artificial intelligence (AI), investors have sought projects that deftly intertwine this dynamic sector with the burgeoning realm of cryptocurrency.

One such project, Bittensor, a decentralized AI marketplace, has catapulted to prominence, attracting notable venture capital firms. Polychain, Digital Currency Group, and dao5 have collectively acquired hundreds of millions of dollars worth of TAO tokens, the fuel that powers a suite of AI-related services offered by the network, encompassing model training and data storage.

Bittensor's TAO token had been previously accessible solely through mining, mid-tier exchanges, and over-the-counter markets. However, its recent listing on both Binance and Crypto.com has ushered in a significant stride for the hitherto low-profile project, whose market capitalization currently hovers near $3.7 billion.

In an interview with Fortune, Bittensor founder Jacob Steeves hailed the advent of centralized tools from OpenAI, Google, and Meta as a testament to the viability of his project, which he commenced in 2015. Despite facing skepticism and accusations of exploiting the AI hype, Steeves remains steadfast in his vision. "It's the most amazing feeling as a builder," Steeves said. "Frankenstein—it's alive."

Venture Capital Support

Bittensor may not possess the mainstream recognition accorded to other crypto projects like Sam Altman-backed Worldcoin, which seeks to mitigate the pervasive influence of AI through a crypto-enabled, eyeball-scanning protocol for establishing human identity. Nevertheless, Bittensor has quietly amassed a cadre of investors.

The VC firm Polychain, co-founded by former Coinbase employee Olaf Carlson-Wee, nurtured Bittensor from its inception in 2019 and holds approximately $200 million worth of Bittensor's token. Carlson-Wee stated that Bittensor "uses an incentive system conceptually similar to Bitcoin mining, but instead of building a payment network, it builds an open-source and public artificial intelligence." He further described it as "a radical new use case for blockchains that is unprecedented."

**Dao5, an investment fund established by Polychain alumnus Tekin Salimi, holds a stake of around $50 million in TAO and was an early supporter of Bittensor's ecosystem.** Digital Currency Group, the influential crypto empire founded by Barry Silbert, is another backer, holding approximately $100 million of TAO.

The influx of investor support underscores the remarkable ascent of Bittensor, which was established years before the November 2022 debut of ChatGPT ignited public awareness of generative AI. Bittensor's network was launched in 2021.

Interplay of Crypto and AI

The intersection of crypto and AI has emerged as a focal point for speculation, with tokens like Worldcoin experiencing price fluctuations in response to news cycles surrounding AI. In late March, three of the most prominent crypto AI projects announced their plans to merge their tokens and form a collective.

While some have dismissed Bittensor's TAO token as a mere "memecoin" riding the wave of AI hype, with its price surging by more than 1,000% in less than a year, Steeves told Fortune that Bittensor's track record attests to its potential as a viable competitor to OpenAI and Google, where he previously worked as an engineer. "People will come and they will go, and if they buy it because it's a memecoin, they won't be here later," he said. "That's fine, because we want people that actually know what we're doing."

Decentralized AI

Steeves credits the Bitcoin network as the inspiration for his vision of Bittensor in 2015. Conceived by the enigmatic Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin leverages the novel concept of mining to record and process transactions, thereby creating an alternative to centralized payment platforms. The system relies on code and a diverse array of participants, from developers to validators, who collectively determine the direction of the protocol. "How did we create a supercomputer that is bigger than any government or corporation can create with a centralized entity," Steeves said. "The answer is Bitcoin used incentive mechanisms."

Bittensor emerged as an attempt to repurpose the foundational principles of Bitcoin for the complex array of functions required by the burgeoning field of AI, encompassing data storage and the training of machine learning models. Numerous crypto projects "pre-mine" tokens or allocate holdings to early investors through mechanisms such as Simple Agreements for Future Tokens (SAFTs). However, Steeves chose to adhere to the pure Bitcoin model, with participants earning TAO tokens solely through mining, akin to Nakamoto's original design.

Despite sharing Bitcoin's DNA, Bittensor's underlying system is far more intricate, offering a diverse range of functions beyond Bitcoin's simple transaction model. Miners engage in specialized competitions based on the tasks they perform, incentivized by the prospect of earning TAO. These diverse tools are distributed across 32 "subnets," or specialized networks, providing services such as data storage, access to AI-powered chatbots, scraping, and price oracles.

While the intricate nature of Bittensor's design may seem esoteric, it stems from the project's evolutionary growth and its ongoing struggle to articulate its value to the public. Nonetheless, the project has garnered a passionate community of stakeholders, including miners, validators, and projects building on the Bittensor platform. Steeves highlighted Corcel, an AI company that has developed products such as a chatbot powered by Bittensor, as an example of early real-world applications emerging from the protocol.

Beyond the support of VC firms like Polychain, prominent companies are also bolstering Bittensor by acting as validators, influencing the development of subnets through their TAO holdings. Foundry, the DCG-owned Bitcoin mining behemoth, operates a subnet that incentivizes miners to predict the S&P 500 price index during trading hours.

Bittensor's Competitive Landscape

As Bittensor continues its rapid ascent, its most significant breakthrough to date may have been its listing on Binance last week, which propelled the TAO token to large-scale trading. Steeves noted that the annualized trading volume of TAO during its debut day on Binance surpassed the GDP of Peru, where he has resided for the past four years.

Steeves emphasized that Bittensor's ambitions extend far beyond the price fluctuations of its cryptocurrency. Driven by its byzantine system of subnets and associated projects, the network will constantly evolve in response to demand, as well as the interplay between miners and validators as they strive to maintain equilibrium within the incentive mechanisms.

"It's this constant churn—a battle between the light and the dark," Steeves told Fortune. "That's a lot of why we like Taoist symbolism."

With companies like OpenAI continuing to dominate the AI landscape, Steeves believes that Bittensor will provide a solution to what he perceives as the true existential threat posed by artificial intelligence. "The real issue is not that the AIs are going to take over the world—that's what they'd like to sell," he said. "It's not the iRobot outcome, it's the Elysium outcome, where humanity and the world is so centralized in terms of power, metastasized by artificial intelligence, that all of us are just but slaves effectively to these massive companies."