1. Introduction
Bittensor (TAO) is emerging as the foundational asset of decentralized artificial intelligence—a network designed not just to secure data, but to produce intelligence itself. By combining blockchain’s incentive structure with open-source machine learning, Bittensor enables anyone to contribute AI compute and earn rewards for valuable outputs. Unlike traditional AI development, which is often siloed within large corporations or academic labs, Bittensor creates a permissionless marketplace where inference, training, and validation are decentralized and economically aligned.
The network’s launch was uniquely fair, like Bitcoin: no venture capital, no premine, and no team allocation. Every TAO in circulation has been earned on-chain. This clean distribution model is paired with an economic engine—known as Dynamic TAO (dTAO)—which governs how emissions flow to productive AI subnets. Introduced on February 13, 2025, dTAO marked a turning point in Bittensor’s architecture, turning TAO into both the economic and governance backbone of a growing ecosystem of AI modules.