Bittensor’s biggest-ever corporate partnership, secured by its best-ever commercial dealmaker @MaxScore - to build a ‘Business Operations World Model.’ Full article via Manako, or better yet watch Max’s live X space featuring JT of PwC France. On one level, partnering with a global ‘Big Four’ firm is a significant milestone, but there’s another level of institutional adoption here, best explained by AndyTT’s analysis: ‘PwC France and Maghreb will integrate Manako's Business Operations World Model into its AI and digital advisory practice. That model runs on decentralized AI infrastructure. On Bittensor.’ 

On Wednesday 15th, Jake brought Bittensor together to broadcast the protocol-level upgrades following Covenant’s exit. Const walked through Conviction, a new primitive allowing owners to lock their own alpha stake for a fixed period, signalling long-term confidence in their project, and allowing others who share confidence in their leadership to stake in conviction with them. What followed was a quickfire Q&A, featuring Jake answering dozens upon dozens of questions from across the board: a good old fashioned town hall. Finally, Mog took the stage to air his reservations, namely that disgruntled miners could seek to depose the subnet owner in a coup; to be continued, no doubt.

Talking of big partnerships, Venice - another crypto-AI project - revealed that its latest Uncensored 1.2 model was tuned on SN4, Targon. Founder Eric Voorhees' claim to be working with Bittensor subnets was confirmed by Const (‘Pleasure is ours, Eric’) in what may well be the most surprising ‘Targon mentioned’ of all.  Nope, wasn’t expecting this either.

Another hit from France: Paris Blockchain Week with a Bittensor track, led by Yuma. It’s a relief to see so many subnets present: last year, I went to PBW with @MacrocosmosAI CFO Mike Bunting, and it was basically a Web3 Toys ‘r’ Us - shilling followed by middle-of-the-road corporate presentations. From zero Bittensor presentations to a whole track feels like progress.

Decentralized pretraining didn’t die with Covenant. Macrocosmos just published their 128x compression strategy, ResBM, developed in-house on SN9, IOTA - and it ranks as state-of-the-art. Beating frontier labs at their own game - without raising a buck in funding - is impressive, but even more so with such a cost-intensive challenge as LLM pretraining. The authors - Alan Aboudib, Kalei Brady, Steffen Cruz, and Rodrigo Lopez - are some of the smartest people I’ve ever worked with, and certainly some of the nicest. They wouldn’t rug Bittensor, 72B or not.

I've spent a year explaining Bittensor to people who still can't tell a subnet from a submarine. So watching Evan Malanga walk the Nasdaq studio through the ecosystem - clearly, confidently, on one of TradFi's biggest stages - was a genuine fist-pump moment. The intersection of AI and crypto has been all too easy for Wall St to ignore. It's getting harder. 

Out of 1,000+ startups that applied to the PBW startup competition, the winner was from Bittensor. Huge congratulations to Score and the team - but honestly, were any of us surprised? The only question was always which subnet would bring it home first (also not a surprise: that it happened to be SN44).

$TAO/USDT - the bounce-back protocol 

Covenant left. The chart sold off. And yet here we are, right back at the same support level that held in December and again in January. If there's one thing this chart tells you about Bittensor, it's that the ecosystem has a habit of finding its floor. $251 is the line. It's held before. The builders didn't leave - and neither, it seems, did the buyers.