from the editor…
Three thousand TAO to register a new subnet.
Bittensor’s Miami heist at Consensus 2026.
Striker head-to-head with Const on Conviction.
…No other L1 does drama quite like Bittensor. But no L1 ships quite like Bittensor, either.
Because no matter what happens, the competition relentlessly continues.
This week: molecular discovery race heats up with Minos on mainnet, Niome on the national development agency of Scotland, and Nova on Novelty Search.
Meanwhile, Manako dropped their product demo and website.
Conviction Locks just hit testnet.
Oh, and Chutes partnered up with an AI-agent platform listed on NASDAQ.
Chris Zacharia, Editor
It feels like we’re developing in every direction at once - and being tested across every vector, from tokenomics to governance and product-market fit.
The next big test? On stage at the Louvre: Proof of Talk, now less than a month away.
Doesn’t get much more dramatic than that.
@macrozack
Highlights
This week in TAO
TAO, now on Solana. Tensora co-founder and Bittensor OG Yoav Cohen took the limelight and the headlines at Consensus 2026, announcing a Solana-native route into TAO via Sunrise DeFi - bringing capital from one of the world’s biggest and fastest-growing ecosystems to Bittensor. Buckle up.
Had to read this one twice: Niome have secured the formal backing of Scotland's national economic development agency. If that feels like particularly speedy progress, that’s because it is: Yuma only launched NIOME in February. But NIOME didn’t come out of nowhere: their team developed genomes.io, their CEO won MIT’s 2026 Entrepreneurship Development Prize, and they’ve already won funding from AWS, Pantera Capital, and AMD.
If there’s one team that can challenge Score for enterprise sales, it’s Yanez. No details revealed - this is a sector that prizes privacy - but it is apparently the first cross-sell from Yanez’s web2 business, whose backend is SN54. Plus: Jason Calacanis x Jose Caldera, tonight on This Week in Startups.
Another step forward for Seby: KYC and income verification are now integrated on the subnet’s real estate intelligence platform. Seby also announced his venture studio, appropriately called YUGE, who emerged from stealth to launch HeyDitto on Subnet 118, agnostic agent-first memory infrastructure ‘for a hundredth of the cost.’ Yep, sounds pretty YUGE.
Manifold Labs on a serious roll right now. The portal provides two on-ramps for organizations to utilize their idle compute capacity on Bittensor, self-directed or managed by Targon. The portal is now open, in case you have a couple M3 Ultras going to waste…
Deep Dives
Bringing together monthly metrics, technical enhancements, and media appearances across all of Bitstarter’s teams: Quasar, Djinn, Handshake, and AdTAO, plus SN66 and SN107. I based this on the Subnet Status Updates we used to publish at Macrocosmos, back when we had x5 subnets. Feedback (mostly) welcome.
Most backers of new subnets turn up the hype to max, but Tensia Foundation did something pretty remarkable: they introduced Entangle Protocol with a thorough critique that included their doubts, inviting further commentary to assure the concept. As someone who receives a lot of subnet proposals, this is a much better way of winning attention: showing your thinking, highlighting areas for improvement, and bringing in expertise from across the network.
In the media
And the first x3 subnets pitched to Lucky’s 2m followers are...Chutes, Targon, and Leoma. Lucky is a Bitcoin-since-2009 crypto granddaddy, and he’s not the only one. First-generation BTC maxis are finally following Const’s path.
Tweet of the Week
Const hosted SN68, Nova, who revealed their drug development on Bittensor: triple reuptake inhibitors for dopamine, serotonin, and norepinephrine transporters, aiming to discover potent next-generation TRIs. Then Algod (aka Striker) took the stage to debate Const on Conviction, arguing that a) it puts yet more pressure on subnet owners, and b) it wouldn’t stop rugging per se, but merely turn regular rugging into what Striker called ‘slow rugging.’ Cue much debate, most of it in good spirit. Whichever side you take, it’s great that the founder takes the time to hear out genuine criticism, and that we have builders like Striker holding rules and regulations to account.
Chart of the Week
SN93 shared a graph of their revenue growth and buybacks, with a link to their live revenue dashboard - showing sustainable growth, followed by exponential growth.
Builder of the Week
It’s looking very nice indeed. Well done Max & team, once again.
See you there…
TAO Times is an official media partner of this year’s Proof of Talk - June 1-3 at the Louvre in Paris. We’ll be covering the Bittensor track there from the inside out. You can join us with a 30% off ticket using the code: TAO here.
Early bird tickets to Exploit Summit 2026 in Montreal in September end next Friday (May 15th) - after that the price jumps from $399 to $499 so grab them while you can… this one is not to be missed.
Bringing TAO to the world.