Pushing partnerships, pushing to mainnet
from the editor…
A year ago, the news that Subnet 85 had secured access to Hollywood’s biggest studios would’ve been the blockbuster headline of the quarter, let alone the week.
Or maybe it would’ve been the news that Subnet 71 had been chosen for Salesforce’s launchpad.
Or Subnet 24’s partnership with an AI start-up founded by a former DeepMind exec.
The real-world, revenue-generating partnerships that Bittensor longed for last year have finally been realised.
But just as reassuring is the quality and cadence of teams hitting main.
Chris Zacharia, Editor
This week, Minos and Oro made waves on mainnet, following their impressive journeys onto the protocol.
Because regardless of Bittensor’s standing in the business world, the reputation of the network depends on its subnets.
And if they carry on like this, both SN107 and SN15 will be winning attention-grabbing partnerships of their own before too long.
@macrozack
Highlights
This week in TAO
Netflix, Amazon, Sony, Universal, and Paramount: SN85’s new joint venture with Pip Studios gives Vidaio access to the biggest names in Hollywood. By allowing SN85 into the Trusted Partner Network, it unlocks 50+ major partnerships and becoming the ‘AI-native video infrastructure layer.’
As ever, Gavin and Pranav are cooking: this partnership with Salesforce will give SN71 access to the platform’s ‘ecosystem, AI capabilities, and go-to-market support.’ I’d not heard of the launchpad before, but it’s another sign that Web2 SaaS is attempting to nurture AI start-ups on chain. They made a good choice with Leadpoet.
What a month it’s been for Quasar. Announcing their model, reaching mainnet, and now this. Adaption AI will provide Quasar with high-quality, adaptive datasets at scale, solving one of pretraining’s hardest problems: data.
Two of Bittensor’s hottest new teams hit mainnet this week: Minos, which you can now mine by spinning up MinosVM via Targon, and Oro, who published their first leaderboard together with their results. Both could be big hitters. bitstarter.ai incubated SN107 before they got their subnet (one of my team suggested the name ‘Minos’) and their conviction was clear from day one. And, at his talk at Imperial, Const called Oro his favourite new subnet concept.
Machine Learning is Bittensor’s lifeblood, but so far its entry onto the protocol has been left to chance. Our ML track at bitstarter.ai changes that. Following Quasar’s successful incubation, Jake wanted us to bring more machine learning teams onto the protocol - with backing from Targon (and other partners yet to be announced), we’re committed to finding and incubating the next great AI start-ups on Bittensor.
In the media
The first of Subnet Summer’s dedicated X spaces, following their much-needed space with Const on the night of the Covenant crisis. It starts with Gordon Frayne, Mike Grantis, and myself, before diving into subnet-specific presentations.
Tweet of the Week
…I’d be lying if I said I saw this one coming. Yoav’s speaking at Solana Accelerate next week in Miami, which is apparently held during Consensus 2026. If you’re attending the conference, please do drop in on Yoav and give him hi-five from me.
DSV’s Mark Creaser and Siam Kidd stand out among investors for launching new teams again and again and again. This time, they’ve gone straight to Revenue Search with Green Compute, founded by fellow Brit and builder Josh Riddett. As ever with Mark and Siam, it’s a cracking conversation, especially because of Josh. SN110’s new founder is the kind of guy who retrofits barns with GPUs so that farmers can use excess power for inference. How do DSV find these guys? RIP, Rich Kids of TAO.
Deep Dive
Nick Sawinyh @sawinyh with this thoroughly comprehensive (and thoroughly enjoyable) deep-dive into $TAO’s tokenomics.
Bringing TAO to the world.