TAO Times is back
from the editor
As a long-time reader - and first time editor - of TaoTimes, it’s an honour to re-launch Bittensor’s biggest newsletter.
I kept the X announcement brief, because I want to build TT gradually, but we’re aiming to publish two newsletters a week: a weekly roundup on Fridays, and a single ‘deep dive’ article on Mondays.
If that holds, we’ll expand to publishing submissions ahead of a website relaunch in Q3. In the meantime: this is Friday 13th March, 2026, and I bring you this week in Bittensor…
Chris Zacharia, Editor
Deep dive
How a strong Bittensor portfolio outperformed Bitcoin
While crypto crashed, subnet tokens tracking real products held strong. Interesting piece by Matthew Karas of Babelbit on why Bittensor works like a decentralised stock market for AI startups.
This week in TAO
Highlights
Finally: Bittensor winning attention from the wider world of AI for a significant contribution to pretraining. Huge respect to Sam Dare - he’s been fighting for this for a long time. Anthropic are noticing.
From 150+ submissions, down to the final dozen: ranked as the top 7, and the ‘Honourable Mentions’ who nonetheless still go through to the next round. As one of the judging panel, I was surprised at the quality of applications; four of my top 7 made the top 7, but then so did two of the teams that I scored lowest… go figure.
Micaela Bazo’s team have been quietly exploring chemical space, and are beginning to reap the rewards. An SN68 miner surfaced a new approach to optimizing molecular pathfinding, potentially leading to drug discovery innovation. It’s such a pleasure to see pioneer DeSci research conducted on-chain - I was a huge proponent of SN25, Mainframe at Macrocosmos. Metanova more than deserve their status as Bittensor’s lead scientists.
For me, Proof of Talk was the best Bittensor conference of 2025. Anyone who thought it was a one-off can rest easy: this week, the conference announced Jake and Ala as keynote speakers, plus a range of leading figures across tech, finance, and institutional capital. Plus, they tweeted last year’s Novelty Search Live in the Louvre, featuring Will and Steff of Macrocosmos debuting Subnet 9, IOTA. See you in Paris.
Mike Grantis and co. are making moves. General Tensor develop subnets, run validation through RT21, and fund DeFi applications; journalist Daniel Kuhn in the block describes them as a ‘TAO generation vehicle,’ citing the company’s claim to generate the token at around 40x the cost efficiency of simply buying and holding.
In the media
Ever since Rob Greer and Mark Jeffrey announced Jason Calacanis as a partner in Stillcore Capital, I’ve been looking forward to this moment: Jason’s first All-In pod feat. TAO.
Jason was at Davos in January (full disclosure: I was there too, although unlike Jason I was not pictured hanging out with Elon) and mentioned TAO during a live interview there, but this is the first time he’s devoted a whole show to Bittensor.
Love to see it. May there be many more.
Tweet of the week
Is it me, or does it feel like there’s a wave of wider interest in the protocol? CoinCecko’s shout-out (2.3m followers) is but one of many. House of —, — and… are all regularly tweeting about TAO. Very glad that we now have a hefty weight of subnets with newsworthy progress in their fields. I’m sensing an opportunity to capitalize on this…
until next time…
"The best way to predict the future is to invent it."
- Alan Kay
Bringing TAO to the world.