With Bitcoin now in its fourth four-year halving, other decentralized projects have adopted similar supply reduction cycles – and Bittensor is approaching its first since launching in 2021.
Bittensor, an open source decentralized machine learning network built around specialized “subnets” that fuel markets for artificial intelligence services, is expected to undergo its inaugural halving on or around December 14. At that point, the issuance of its original token, TAO (TAO), will drop to 3,600 per day from the current 7,200.
Grayscale Research analyst William Ogden Moore called the event “a key milestone in the maturation of the network as it moves toward a supply cap of 21 million tokens,” which matches the fixed limit for Bitcoin (BTC).
Digital asset investors and network participants often view limited supply as a potential value catalyst: if adoption grows and demand for tokens increases, a limited issuance model may be more attractive than pre-mined tokens or fiat currencies with effectively unlimited supply.
Cointelegraph reported on Bittensor in May during a conversation with DNA Fund’s Chris Miglin, whose AI compute fund is heavily involved in the Bittensor ecosystem.
“The biggest thing we’re working on across the ecosystem is our artificial intelligence compute pool, where we’re rooted in the TAO ecosystem,” Miglino said.
Related: Grayscale represents Bittensor and Sui trust products
Dive into Bittensor subnets
Grayscale describes Bittensor’s subnets as a sort of “Y combiner for decentralized AI networks,” since each acts like a startup building a specialized product or service.
CoinGecko currently lists over 100 Bittensor subnets, with a combined market cap exceeding $850 million. Taostats, which monitors the ecosystem more comprehensively, shows 129 subnets with a total market capitalization close to $3 billion.
Either way, the subnet’s valuation has risen significantly since launch, according to Grayscale Research. The largest include Chutes, which provides serverless computing for AI models, and Ridges, a subnet focused on crowdsourcing the development of AI agents.
The expansion underscores the growing demand for decentralized AI infrastructure as developers race to build and scale new AI products and applications.
As Miglino told Cointelegraph, decentralized artificial intelligence could turn out to be the most significant blockchain use case after Bitcoin, largely driven by that demand.
Bittensor subnets are also attracting venture capital. Inference Labs recently closed a $6.3 million round to back Subnet 2, Bittensor’s inference verification marketplace.
Meanwhile, xTao, an infrastructure developer building tools and services for the Bittensor ecosystem, began trading on the TSX Venture Exchange in July as a new public company.
Related: VC Review: Big money, few jobs as funding for crypto ventures dries up
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