Navigating Bittensor: March 2026
The founders step down, a massive 67% TAO surge and Jensen Huang's endorsement
If you spent March focusing on your day job or your family instead of doom-scrolling the Bittensor Discord, congratulations. You made the right choice.
The ecosystem was incredibly loud this month, filled with X hype and subnet drama. Here is the pure signal: the 4 things that actually moved the needle for your portfolio and understanding of the network this month.
How to Read This Compass
I'm organizing these updates by direction: North, East, South, West to give you a repeatable mental model for navigating Bittensor's complexity.
North: Foundation (governance, protocol, core team, security events)
The structural layer. Changes here determine who controls the network and how decisions get made.
East: Capital (markets, volume, liquidity, integrations)
The economic layer. This is where price meets liquidity and institutional conviction shows up in the data.
South: Technology (shipped features, benchmarks, infrastructure, ecosystem health)
The execution layer. What actually works, what got built and where’s the technical proof.
West: Adoption (narrative, mainstream validation, external voices)
The perception layer. This is how the outside world sees Bittensor, from industry titans to normie investors.
Each month, some directions will dominate the signal. Others will stay quiet. The goal is to see which quadrants are moving and what that means for your strategy.
[Foundation] The Founders Step Down and a Leap Towards Full Decentralization
What Happened: In an unexpected shift, on the This Week in Startups podcast Ala Shaabana officially confirmed his departure from the Opentensor Foundation to focus on Crucible Labs, following co-founder Jacob Steeves’ exit in February.
Why It Matters: In my years in the corporate world, I never saw a CEO willingly give up the corner office to go back to the trenches. But that’s exactly what Jacob and now Ala are doing.
They are mirroring Bitcoin’s path, stepping away from the base chain to build crucial infrastructure (wallets, subnets) on top of it.
It reduces our key-person risk and proves the incentive layer works, they’d rather be competing in the trenches than sitting in the foundation.
The Takeaway: Watch what Crucible Labs and Steeves’ new subnet Affine produce; the founders are now competing and building within the very incentive layer they created.
[Capital] TAO’s Monster Rally
What Happened: TAO experienced a massive breakout, surging over 67% in the calendar month and hitting highs around $377+, fueled by Alpha token demand exploding ecosystem-wide.
Why It Matters: Whenever TAO or any large cap crypto goes on a massive run like we saw this month, I always get friends asking if they missed the boat. But I’m not staring at the price; I’m staring at the $900 million in daily trading volume on consecutive days. That level of deep liquidity means institutional money is finally treating Bittensor as a standalone, blue-chip infrastructure play rather than just a retail hype cycle. For my own portfolio, this volume is the strongest signal of conviction we’ve seen yet.
The Takeaway: Track the daily volume metrics just as closely as the price. Maintaining a high level is the liquidity moat required to keep institutional funds flowing into the network.
[Technology] Covenant-72B Advances
What Happened: Covenant-72B, the largest decentralized LLM training project on the network (on Subnet 3 Templar), made major strides this month by officially matching the performance of centralized, open-source baselines on key reasoning benchmarks. Rather than relying on a single, massive server farm, Covenant successfully trained a 72-billion parameter model across a permissionless, globally distributed network of GPUs.
Why It Matters: Watching a huge LLM being trained across a global, decentralized network absolutely blows my mind. For the longest time, critics called Bittensor a speculative tokenomics experiment, but Covenant-72B shatters that narrative. It proves the network can actually handle production-scale AI compute that legitimately rivals the massive, centralized tech labs.
The Takeaway: Subnet 3 (Templar) emissions just became a serious bet. Expect miner incentives to surge as builders chase Covenant-style workloads, pulling more TAO into high-utility delegation pools.
[Adoption] The Attention of Industry Titans
What Happened: NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang explicitly endorsed Bittensor on the All-In Podcast and Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark talked up a “meaningful win” for the network in his Import AI newsletter.
Why It Matters: For the last year, whenever I (rarely) tried to explain Bittensor in corporate settings or internal tech discussions, I’d usually get polite, blank stares. But with NVIDIA’s Jensen Huang and Anthropic’s Jack Clark publicly acknowledging the network this month (on the back of Templar's distributed training of the 72-billion-parameter model), they essentially did my job for me.
When the world’s biggest AI hardware supplier and a top frontier model architect validate the ecosystem, it mainstreams our decentralized thesis overnight and makes the elevator pitch to TradFi peers a whole lot easier.
The Takeaway: Use these endorsements to explain Bittensor to your TradFi and Web2 peers. It’s the ultimate elevator pitch validator.
When I look at this list, the shift that impacts my own strategy the most is the remaining co-founder stepping down from the Foundation to focus solely on building Crucible Labs. It’s a massive de-risking event for the network. Removing this centralized point of failure is what truly shifts TAO from a speculative bet into resilient public infrastructure.
The one risk I’m still sitting with, and the trade off worth watching this year: Crucible Labs, Affine (Steeves’ subnet) and the founders’ reputations are now tightly coupled. If they stumble publicly, the halo effect reverses.
Which of these impacts your TAO strategy the most? Are you more bullish on the founders’ stepping back, or the macro endorsements from leaders like Jensen Huang?
And if I missed something important from March, what would you add to this list?
Reply to this email and let me know. I read every single one.
Disclaimer: This is not financial advice. I am a writer documenting the Bittensor ecosystem. Always do your own research.
Thank you Brian, truly useful 🙏