San Francisco for Breakout. A blur of January in Davos. And in about a week, the Louvre. So far in 2026, the departure lounge has meant travelling for Bittensor. 

But the jetlag has been worth it. For years, “Bittensor events" meant a side room at someone else's conference, where you'd corner three people who actually knew what a subnet was and call it a community. We now have an events calendar - a pretty packed one at that - and the two dates that matter most are bookending the summer.

The first is Proof of Talk, June 2–3, at the Louvre Palace in Paris. The second is Exploit, September 28–29, at New City Gas in Montreal.

Each speaks to two different halves of this ecosystem - the half that backs and the half that builds - and if you're serious about Bittensor, the honest answer is that you probably belong at both.

If you've heard Proof of Talk described as “the Davos of Web3," that's not marketing puff - it's roughly accurate, and it's the point. This is the fourth edition, it's sold out the last two years running, and the room is capped at 2,500. The organisers will tell you that 95% of speakers sit at CEO or founder level and that the attendee list represents something like $18 trillion in assets under management. I have no way of auditing that number, but I've been in the building, and I can tell you the calibre of person you bump into by the coffee is not normal.

Bittensor has its own dedicated track, running across both days with Jacob Steeves and Ala Shaabana on the agenda, Const headlining a June 3 fireside, and the likes of Mog, Robert Myers of Manifold, Mike Grantis, Will Squires, Steffen Cruz, and Sami Kassab moving through the sessions. The track's own framing says it best: where founders meet capital.

This is the event you go to if you think about Bittensor in terms of position size, custody, liquidity, and conviction. If you're an investor trying to work out whether TAO is a real asset class or a narrative that'll evaporate by Q4 - this is the room that answers the question, not by telling you, but by showing you who else is already there. BitGo, Grayscale, the institutional plumbing we spent all of last year wishing for: it's converging on one weekend in Paris.

And then there's Proof of Pitch.

I'll declare my interest plainly, because the alternative is pretending I don't have one. Through bitstarter.ai, we're running Proof of Pitch - the startup competition inside the Bittensor track - and I could not be more excited about how it's shaping up.

The format is built for drama. Four teams pitch live on stage on June 3. A panel of judges - including Const, Mog, and MG - narrows it to two finalists. The audience pledges real TAO, in real time, and the bar fills on the screen while the founders take questions from the judges and the floor. It is, as far as I know, the first time anyone's tried to do live subnet crowdfunding at an event of this scale, and the prize for winning is not a trophy and a handshake. It's a fully-funded subnet slot, bitstarter incubation, capital, podcast slots, a founder interview in this newsletter, and the kind of investor access that usually takes a year of cold DMs to assemble.

Watching a subnet get funded into existence in front of 2,500 of the most serious people in the space is about the most on-brand thing I can imagine Bittensor doing.

We'll also be on stage on June 2 with Macrocosmos, walking through what state-of-the-art machine learning on Bittensor actually looks like - IOTA, Training at Home, and a breakthrough announcement I'm not allowed to spoil yet. Consider it the builder's counterweight to the investor-led energy of the pitch.

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Which brings us to Montreal, this September.

If Proof of Talk is the room where capital decides, Exploit is the room where the work happens. It's the inaugural Bittensor developer conference - the only Bittensor-specific conference of the year - produced by Bittensor Commons, the non-profit, by-the-community-for-the-community outfit. And it carries a tagline I've come to genuinely love: Break it down. Build it better.

Bittensor is adversarial by design - miner against validator, attack against defence, every assumption stress-tested until only the things that survive contact with reality are left standing. Exploit takes that ethos and turns it into a two-day event. 

Three tracks: the compute economy (incentives, infrastructure, mining), the intelligence frontier (where decentralised AI is actually heading, and what could go wrong), and the applied layer (what's getting shipped and adopted). Talks, debates, live demos, workshops. Less "watch the experts," more "argue with them."

I was at Breakout in San Francisco in March - the smaller, first-of-its-kind Commons gathering that was, in hindsight, the warm-up act. I wrote at the time about being repeatedly ushered in front of builders who'd discovered Bittensor in the previous quarter, and about two separate people asking me where to stake the seven figures of TAO they'd just bought. That was 100-odd people in a room. Exploit is the full version of that energy, intentionally capped at 1,000, in a restored 19th-century industrial hall in Griffintown that looks exactly as good as it sounds.

The speaker roster already tells you who this is for: Jacob Steeves, Max Sebti of Score, Mog, Micaela Bazo of Metanova, Shakeel Hussein of Ridges, Steffen Cruz of Macrocosmos - with more to be announced this month. These are people who ship. If your relationship with Bittensor is measured in commits and not just in cost basis, this is your weekend.

A practical note, since this is a guide and not just a love letter: we're now into the next phase of ticket pricing. Exploit runs tiered pricing, and the price climbs as the tiers sell through. If Montreal in September is on your list, the cheapest it will ever be is right now. Grab one here.

(And for what it's worth - TAO Times is a proud media partner of both Exploit and Proof of Talk. We'll be covering both from the inside, so even if you can't make the flights, it'll all make its way back to your inbox.)

Here's the cleanest way I can put it.

Go to Proof of Talk if you want to understand where the capital is going - if you're an allocator, an investor, a founder raising, or simply someone who wants to see the institutional case for Bittensor argued in front of the people who'll decide it. June. Paris. The Louvre. Capital meeting conviction.

Go to Exploit if you want to be part of building the thing the capital is chasing - if you're a developer, a researcher, a miner, a validator, or a curious outsider from the wider AI world who wants to find out what all the fuss is about. September. Montreal. Builders meeting each other.

Backers in June, builders in September. Two rooms, one ecosystem.

And if you can swing both? Then you'll have seen the whole machine - the capital and the code, the conviction and the craft - in the space of a single summer. I'll be at both, somewhere near the coffee, almost certainly jetlagged.

See you there.

@macrozack

Bringing TAO to the world.