The Art of Disruption: Bittensor and the New Intelligence Economy

The Art of Disruption: Bittensor & and the New Intelligence Economy is a series of interviews we shot at Proof of Talk at the iconic Louvre in Paris.

Explore the minds of Bittensor’s brightest:
Jacob Steeves & Ala Shaabana, Co-Founders of Bittensor
Joseph Jacks of OSS Capital, Latent Holdings & Taohash
James Altucher of TAO Synergies
Micaela Bazo of Metanova Labs
Siam Kidd of DSV Fund/Oblong
Rob Greer of Stillcore Capital
Ken Miyachi of BitMind Labs
Ben James of 404Gen

Timestamp:
0:00 Intro
01:16 Jacob Steeves
07:34 Ala Shaabana
12:24 Joseph Jacks
17:46 James Altucher
27:26 Siam Kidd
40:17 Jose Rios
48:42 Micaela Bazo
56:04 Ken Miyachi
57:07 Ben James
01:03:25 Rob Greer

🎥
Starring CH Egan
Produced by Media3.ai and The Crypto Rabbit Hole
Directed, Shot & Edited by Joseph Gabay

Special thanks to Proof of Talk and BitCast (Sn93)

Hey, my name is CH. I’m your host. Welcome to proof of talk 2025. It’s a major blockchain conference. I’m here, I’m about to lead you into the realm of AI, all the excitement surrounding it. And we’re talking to the top minds in the Bittensor ecosystem. It really is the leading decentralized AI revolution. And I can’t wait to show you what’s up. Check it out. We do have the founder of Bittensor here with us. or should I say the Opentensor Foundation? Yes. Yes, technical there. Maybe a little brief intro of yourself. So I’ve been building Bittensor since 2015. And that’s what I do to this day. I just launched a subnet. Now I’m a subnet owner. Buy my subnet– I’m just kidding. Just kidding. I’m kidding. I’m trying to build something unique in the ecosystem and compete with other subnet developers. I’ve been doing this for a very long time. Obsessed with artificial intelligence and crypto. I was a Bitcoiner super early. I actually feel like Bitcoin is more important than TAO. I know that’s weird to say. But I would die for Bitcoin over TAO. And I think that that’s important. I think that we need that shield. I was just like berated about this on the CoinDesk call. I think it was CoinDesk. They were like, oh, yeah, why do you need your own coin? I was like, wow, I haven’t talked to Bitcoin maximalists in a long time. But thank God for Bitcoin maximalists. The toxicity is what keeps us all safe. So I mean, me, I think if you’re into TAO, you know a lot about my life even. Yeah, I’ve been doing this before I was working at Google, before I was working on DARPA, doing military grade tech. And is that enough? That’s great. What was really the big aha moment of saying, OK, actually, going off of Bitcoin success, I want to build TAO. What was that kind of– you know what I mean? What was that drive? Well, the guy who explained Bitcoin to me was my previous boss. And he was building brain chips. And these brain chips were all about training machine learning models with pure electricity. So it was like, how do we flow electricity through a chip and then train or learn? Thermodynamic computing. It’s exactly what like Beff Jezos is doing right now with Extropic. But we were doing that back in 2015. And anyways, the epiphany for me, I believe, was when I really thought about computing in terms of energy flow. I was like, OK, well, computing can actually be– the most natural way to do computing is what you see with like a river or like the brain, which is all about electrical flow. And I thought, well, hey, humanities most developed abstraction for energy is money. And so we just had this revolution in money. We’re having this revolution in computing around artificial intelligence. And there’s clearly like this unification out there. And so it was way back then I was a bushy, bushy-tailed, bright-eyed young kid. And I didn’t know much about what it would take to get to where we are today. But that was the original inspiration. I was really obsessed with this idea of bringing natural-style computing with cryptocurrency in order to facilitate computation at that scale. The thesis has evolved over time. And we’ve really crystallized what that is now. But that was the original inspiration. And so I left my job working as a contractor for DARPA and did that ever since. Yeah, for sure. It’s definitely inspiring. What you’ve built is absolutely incredible. Now, where do you see the world, let’s say five, maybe 10 years? How do you see Bittensor, in your mind, impacting humankind? Where do you see that world? Well, I think that we’re going to create the most powerful artificial intelligence there is. So when you think, hey, I want to get the best answer to a question, I want the literal pinnacle of that element. And I believe it’s an element. It’s like a digital commodity. We say that term a lot. I think that that’s going to be something that Bittensor produces. And the way that we’re going to produce that is by building up the layers of digital commodities all the way until we get to this top one. And right now, we have compute. We have storage. We have inference. We have training. All of these things are going to take us higher up this filtration system towards we get to more refined elements. And I think that people will know Bittensor as the creator of intelligence and something that they can own and that they can participate in. It won’t be the be all end all. I’m sure there will be other sorts of technologies that people use. And maybe who knows what they will look like. But I think that Bittensor will be a foundation layer for all the ways in which we build companies in the world of artificial intelligence in the future. So that’s five years. Five years is a good amount of time to make that kind of thing happen. So if we’re not really competing with OpenAI, with our stack that we’re building in about five years, I think that we would have failed. How do you see this nature playing out in the world of technology? Mm. There’s this famous quote. It’s like, sufficiently complex technology is indistinguishable from magic, you know this phrase? Not too familiar. I believe that the highest order technologies are actually just coalescing and converging towards nature. So I would say a sufficiently advanced technology is not distinguishable from nature. So I really believe that what we’re building is natural technology. We have an obsession in our culture around survival of the fittest, Darwinian evolution. If you look at nature in a harmonious and actually working ecosystem, it’s more like the survival of the most collaborative and the most productive and the most interconnected that really survive. And so that’s a subtle change. But it really tells you how you want to build technology. Right? So right now, what we’re doing with Bittensor is we’re making sure the Bittensor is connected. How are we connecting Bittensor together? And I think that we can take a lesson like that and put it into technology and make it actually align with humanity and make it better for people. If I had not had those experiences, I might have thought, well, it’s all about competing. OK, well, I’m going to go and try to attack my competitors because I’m going to be out compete them, make it very aggressive and like an antagonistic sort of philosophy and technology at its core. But instead, I think that I’ve been trying all my life to imbue the lessons that I learned from the jungle and from plant medicine into everything, not just my technology. I love it. Fantastic. You heard it here first. This is Mr. Jacob Stevee’s, @const himself. My man, thank you so much. Really appreciate it. Thank you. We got the man here, co-founder of Bittensor, or should I say Opentensor Foundation? Both. Both. Yeah. Ala, it’s a pleasure to have you with us. Thanks so much. I appreciate it. Thank you for taking the time. Maybe just a little intro. Do you mind giving a bit of your background, but also your unique perspective on tech and investing in kind of your world of Bittensor? Yeah, yeah, yeah, sure thing. So my background is actually purely academic. It is not in crypto whatsoever. I finished my PhD at McMaster University back in 2017. I ended up joining a couple of bigger tech companies, VMware InstaCart, kind of working on some problems with distributed compute. And then ended up sort of meeting Jake in around 2021. Actually no I’m sorry, 2019. And we worked into 2020 and then launched the chain in 2021. Right. At the time, open source AI was sort of fairly nascent in a way. It was not as advanced as it is today. Now it’s effectively neck and neck with the closed source AI. But back then it was fairly new. Yes. And I recall actually there was even a paper from Google at the time that basically said, “an open source is catching up, we have no moats, we need to do something,” and obviously what they were feared, actually happened. That’s sort of where Bittensor is actually kind of meeting at the nexus point with open source and that we’re sort of incentivizing open source AI in a way. And while helping these open source developers actually build state-of-the-art models while at the same time actually earning back on those built-in models. Right, right. For sure. I mean, it’s definitely fascinating hearing you guys’ story, how Bittensor was starting. So with that, why do you think you guys are on this track now with Bittensor being so disruptive and the world perceiving Bittensor as this sort of Bitcoin of AI and there’s such a, should I say, a bit of a cult following, which is great. It’s a community that’s really full of fire and energy, really wants to keep “pushing T”, so to speak. What do you think is behind that drive? I think a lot of it is sort of exasperation for the status quo. That would be the first thing, at least that’s what drove me into building something like Bittensor is that it’s AI sort of became this almost classist approach where if only if you worked at Stanford or Google or sort of the big tech areas is when you got real access to real AI and you had no chance of competing otherwise. And we first built Bittensor, it was a chance for people to start basically competing back in a way. I think it was sort of a galvanized community initially and now it’s sort of evolved way past that idea. Now it’s sort of become a platform where you can write the language to commoditize anything. And I think it’s sort of hitting at every point that exists today. It’s not just AI anymore. We’re sort of hitting at every other crypto project. We’re hitting at every other regular Web2 project and now you know you can incentivize anything. But I think sort of the measured approach you took towards it and sort of temporary expectations about at the same time making sure people understand what is deserving of being decentralized and what isn’t. Not every problem should be decentralized, obviously. Sure. I think that’s also kind of created a very realistic approach to the problem. And that’s sort of been a breath of fresh air to a lot of people. Absolutely. I do have one more question. Where do you see the world headed, let’s say in the next five to ten years, where do you see Bittensor and TAO kind of in that world that you foresee? I’d love for it. I’d love to see it end up sort of part of every conversation when it comes up to building AI. You know, first question that a VC would ask any prospective owner is why would you need that much funding? Why can’t you build it as a subnet? Be efficient. Yeah, exactly. Be efficient, right? Like be grassroots, be how we did it, right? Yes. There’s other projects that I’m not going to mention that are in the same space that are actually raising hundreds of millions of dollars. Crazy money. We did all of this with I think about 10 million total. Right. Right. And everything else has just been earned from directly validating and mining on the system. And so while that’s not the best approach for everybody, it is a very difficult way to do it, but you do end up with a very, very clean project as a result. Very organic. Very organic. So what I’m hoping is that there’s more and more similar organic projects that are in the works and that are going to come out in five years with Bittensor sort of becoming the status quo for how we do things, either whether it is in decentralized AI, whether it is incentivized compute, or really whatever other problem people are trying to decentralize. Yeah, for sure. Absolutely. So, maybe last remarks that you maybe want to share with the audience that, you know, that excites you, maybe something going forward, any last thoughts you’d like to share? Yeah, absolutely. This is just the beginning. You know, we’re very early. We’ve just started. You know, we’re sort of just now coming into the public eye. This is not sort of anybody who’s seeing this who hasn’t really gotten in on Bittensor yet. There’s lots of time. There’s a lot of things to do and there’s so much to be done. And I guarantee the system is going to be something else entirely in about a a year. I love it. Very, very early. You heard it hear first. Ala, thank you so, so much. Appreciate it. And obviously wish you the best. Thank you so much. Appreciate the time. Cheers. I’ve been running OSS Capital for about seven years now. We’re known as the first venture firm focused exclusively on open source companies, open source founders. Been building in that kind of open source ecosystem for better part of almost 15 years, but about a decade and learned about Bittensor a couple of years, almost three years ago, and was pretty struck by its kind of philosophical alignment with what I’ve been building towards in my career. And it’s kind of like I think of it as sort of the evolution of capitalism and the evolution of how do you align incentives and human behavior to produce useful, useful things. Yeah. So going off of that, why do you think BitTensor is so disruptive and really why are you going all in on this thing? Well, I mean, I believe that Bittensor really represents the evolution of capitalism and the way capitalism has sort of been operating for that part of 400 years has been where people create corporations. They control and manage those corporations entirely and sort of like centralize the coordination of resources, employ people in this sort of this like very hierarchical structure. And with Bittensor, it really sort of like flips the idea of capitalism on its head, but sort of preserves this incentive to create something where you actually generate a sustainable profit or sustainable kind of like economic return in exchange for producing something useful for the world or actually innovating or producing some useful commodities is sort of what people kind of talk about quite a lot is Bittensor is kind of a commodities marketplace. And to me, that’s a really powerful evolution or innovation for the world because I think it will sort of amplify and expand the scope of capitalism to greater and greater heights, maybe orders of magnitude more than capitalism has sort of already achieved, which is pretty substantially, hundreds of trillions of dollars in value creation. And I’m a capitalist, like I really strongly believe that that capitalism and sort of business in general is the greatest sort of like lever for human abundance and human productivity. And when you have the sort of like structure that everyone uses to express capitalism in a very centralized way, I believe it sort of like actually limits the potential of capitalism. And so what Bittensor does is it sort of expands that. And obviously we’re in this era of, you know, A.I. acceleration and A.I. really just means like intelligence and innovation acceleration. And so Bittensor is really this kind of like force multiplier for that and creates these really powerful economic incentives to accelerate sort of like permissionless decentralized capitalism in a way that is really powerful. Amazing. I love to hear it. So where do see the world in, let’s say, five to ten years, where do you see TAO not just price wise, but really, where do you see it impacting humankind? I think what what the potential looks like is, you know, Bitcoin created this incentive mechanism sort of puzzle for rewarding anyone permissionlessly to create a certain type of computation, which is the SHA-256 hash. And that sort of increasing complexity provided a very secure sort of database or ledger for a currency for a sort of like a store of value or medium exchange. Most people have used Bitcoin as a store of value, but increasingly can be used as a medium exchange as well. And that’s for a single type of commodity, a single type of computation that produces sort of a fiat alternative or sort of like a more decentralized and robust currency that’s decentralized and permissionless. What Bittensor does, it takes that design and it sort of generalizes it across any type of commodity. And so for me, I think the potential for Bittensor, especially since it had an almost identical design and launch and sort of creation process, it was fair launch, wasn’t funded by VCs. The founders very conservatively mined the network. A lot of people know this, but it’s worth reinforcing. Satoshi quite aggressively mines Bitcoin up to actually five percent of the total network supply. So about a million Bitcoin were actually mined by Satoshi in the early days. So I think that Bittensor’s magnitude, I try to stay away from mentioning exact numbers. I mean, I have mentioned numbers and stuff like on my Twitter account, but I think it’s maybe an order of magnitude or maybe many orders of magnitude bigger than the scale of the success of Bitcoin. Because when you think about capitalism in general, I think it’s sort of the full scope of human expression in terms of how you can actually incentivizing coordinate really anything. And fiat and sort of the notion of capital is relegated to sort of how you represent the capitalism process. So maybe to use some of the evangelism, Michael Saylor has been promoting a lot for Bitcoin. Bitcoin is digital capital. Bittensor is digital capitalism. And I think you can get a decent kind of intuition for sort of how large Bittensor could be relative to capital. And then also just if you look at the sort of currencies market, currencies in general are worth maybe some tens of trillions. Equities are worth some hundreds of trillions. So it’s a pretty big sort of differential. Right. Right. It’s so great to finally connect. Thank you so much. Appreciate it. Yeah. So I’m James Altucher and I’ve been a tech person since I went to graduate school for computer science, undergrad for computer science. I’ve been a software engineer, had a software company, built it and sold it. But a few years ago, I started a crypto newsletter, crypto research service. TAO was one of my first recommendations in 2023 at $49. I’ve been following it ever since. But most recently, I’m involved with a public company, SNPX. And we decided to drop everything we’re doing. And the only thing we’re doing right now is buying TAO. What Bitcoin is to currency, I firmly believe TAO is to capitalism. It’s this marketplace where the incentives, i.e. the rewards given to miners, the incentives are not just to mine Bitcoin, but are actually to come up with great ideas that are going to change the world. So TAO is going to have that tipping point moment where it’s just from here to whatever, infinity. There’s no other, it’s hard to even call it a cryptocurrency or a crypto token. It’s an ecosystem. It’s this marketplace of ideas. And particularly right now, AI ideas, doesn’t have to be AI. But right now, you can basically come up with an idea, create it using the TAO ecosystem, make it a subnet within the ecosystem, and create, I think the first one person billion dollar business is probably going to happen inside the TAO ecosystem. The tools are there, the technology is there, you have access to 30,000 GPUs or more across the whole ecosystem, which is more than what was used to create chat GPT, which is now worth $100 billion. So there’s going to be a tipping point moment again, where people see, “Ah, I didn’t realize I could make a whole AI model without just from my ideas, just from my motivation.” And that excites me. That’s something like this has never existed before. Absolutely. I could not agree more. Maybe the internet is equivalent, like the development of the web in 1991 is equivalent to Bittensor. For those maybe who are unsure about even crypto in general, what would you say to them about Bittensor? Why should they spend all of their time looking into this project? What is it about it that really will change their lives? Well, and look, I’ve been involved in a lot of different businesses. I’ve written a lot of different books about entrepreneurship, finance and whatever. And here’s the thing. What excites me most about Bittensor is the potential for an entrepreneur to go from idea to technical execution to business really quickly using Bittensor. And again, I’ve never seen anything like this. I was thinking of an idea. What if you can take a data set of videos showing people coming into the ER and then it’s labeled, each video is labeled. This person needs a heart surgery. This person needs, you know, he broke his leg. This person needs to get a bullet out. And you wanted to create an AI model, you know, when new videos come in, when new people come into the ER, where do they need to go? Well, I started researching within the Bittensor ecosystem and you could completely create that AI model and turn it into a business probably within 10 days for about $100,000 or less. Whereas imagine if you were going to like do this on your own without the infrastructure within Bittensor. You’d have to buy, you know, Azure supercomputers with Nvidia GPUs to process each frame of the video. You’d have to, I mean, you would essentially have to spend like $100 million to do something that you could probably invent using Bittensor for, again, $100,000 or less. So it’s that the world doesn’t realize that this arbitrage exists. Like, forget about crypto. AI is growing from a $300 billion a year market to a $3 trillion a year market to $30 trillion injected into the economy. Like every company is using it. So some percentage of every dollar of AI is going to go into decentralized AI just because it’s cheaper to make things with decentralized AI. And that and as people realize that that percentage of every dollar that’s put into AI, that percentage that goes into decentralized AI is going to get greater and greater and greater. And the leader by far is the TAO token and the Bittensor ecosystem. I’m not even trying to be like this, this, you know, shill marketer for TAO. I’m only saying this because I was blown away at these what I’m seeing and this realization. This is why I’m, in fact, you know, I’ve done a lot of different things in my career. And I’m like all in right now on, you know, buying TAO tokens through this public company just because I think it’s going to have a lot of value. What I see talking to even subnet creators at this conference is they’re building the functionality of other tokens within this ecosystem and they’re all working together. So I don’t know. Again, I feel like I’m sounding like a shill for it, but I’m only saying what I believe and what I’ve been kind of unraveling over the course of these months and years on my own research. So it really is a rabbit hole because once you jump in and you really see that this is the move, there’s nothing else like it. Why wouldn’t you dive in and really understand it? Because once you do, you build such conviction, at least for me as well. I’m on the same page as you, good sir. So, you know, I go to a lot of conferences and I try to avoid them in general. But let’s say over the past 30 years, I’ve gone to a lot of conferences. OK, sometimes conferences are there to help people make money. Sometimes conferences are there to try to explain some boring, complicated thing. I have seen so much enthusiasm and relationship building and, you know, people talking technical, but really getting right to the nuts and bolts of what’s needed. And also people talking marketing, like how do we explain to people about this great ecosystem? So there’s a lot of thinking about, you know, from the community, not just it’s not top down like most things. Oh, OK, the leaders of Cisco are going to talk about routers or whatever. This is not even of course, it’s decentralized by nature, but you’re really seeing the community as the biggest advocates and creators within this ecosystem, which is what you want. So and again, you know, Bitcoin spends ten billion dollars a year incentivizing, you know, miners to use a lot of electricity, whereas TAO at its current prices are spending about a billion a year rewarding miners to come up with great ideas. With actual intelligence! Yeah, so it’s great instead of just securing the network, which of course is important, but we can have true productivity and innovation in AI to really change the world. I mean, why not? That’s that’s right. I mean, and that’s why I say focus on the AI like it is changing the world, but it’s too expensive. Like open AI needs a hundred billion dollars to grow the next generation. That’s ridiculous. Again, what about decentralized AI? Just the math of it. It’s you’re taking compute and intelligence from a small percentage of the entire world and using that to create the next generation of AI as opposed to spending hundreds of billions of dollars on invidious chips and Microsoft supercomputers. It doesn’t make any sense that people aren’t using this already. Of course, I understand it’s early days, but again, with thirty trillion dollars going into AI over the next few years, some great portion of that is going to go with the decentralized AI. TAO is the leader. That’s why I’m here. I love it. So I have one more question. Where do you see the world? Let’s say five, ten years. Where do you see Bittensor kind of impacting humankind? What do you see AI going as a result of the proliferation of Bittensor? Well, I Well, I think I mean, I can go down the list, but let’s say the two top things you’re going to see better LLM’s than ChatGPT or Grok or whatever come out of Bittensor. And because they will come out of Bittensor, the iteration because it’s a community, the iteration of better and better LLM’s or the ChatGPTs of the world will come out much faster, much more frequently because there’s no centralized core set of developers or managers who are making decisions. Like everybody will be contributing. So you’re going to see better LLM’s than ever, like way beyond what we’re seeing now. Second, let’s just take one sector like health care. You’re going to see massive data sets of patient records, whether it’s patient records or proteins or, you know, synthesized medicines. You’re going to see that loaded up into bit tensor and very quickly, you know, AI models under, you know, being able to do diagnosis much faster, being able to understand, you know, patient complaints and symptoms much faster and do diagnosis much faster. So health care is going to radically change because of Bittensor. That’s going to be a big use case. You know, it’s early stages, but this is where the biggest areas of AI anywhere are going. And so that I would say those are the first two sectors to expect big improvements. Big disruption. Yeah, I love it. Fantastic. Do you have any last remarks you like to share the audience? Any closing thoughts? You know, I’ve been involved in a lot of different cryptos and a lot of different companies. This is the most enthusiasm over a company. It’s almost like people are religious about it, which, okay, that could be a negative thing too. But I’m also seeing people thinking smart business ways as well. And when you have that kind of enthusiasm, that’s really the ingredient. Like I always say whatever it is you’re interested in, obsession is the key to success. And this community is obsessed. You have you seen a community that’s obsessed now. So that’s going to be the key to success of Bittensor. I could not agree more. I attend a lot of crypto conferences and the energy here is so contagious. You know, the vibes are high. And it’s so great to finally meet all the people that you see on X all day that are contributing and really pushing T. And so it’s fantastic to meet you finally. Yeah, thank you. Thank you so much for having me on. So I appreciate it. Yeah, that’s it. Cheers. I’ve been trading for 20 odd years, currency trading. And then in I was the crypto’s biggest critic from 2012 to 2016. So I did buy Bitcoin in 2012. But by the time we got to 2016, I realized I was an idiot. And I just went all in like mid to late 2016. And fast forward. Now, I’ve got a crypto hedge fund. It’s not really a crypto hedge fund. We’re a hedge fund that is 100% allocated into TAO. What is it about how that really excites you? Why do you think it’s so disruptive to the point where you’re allocating fully into TAO? So I’ve got like an investing framework, like a mental model. Now, I like virgin ecosystems, virgin landscape. So if you go to the 1960s to 80s, the virgin landscape then was coding. Anyone that nailed coding became billionaires. Then you had the from the 90s to the noughties, you had the internet. Again, a virgin landscape. Anyone that nailed that became billionaires, you know, all the tech billionaires you can think of that internet billionaires. And obviously, we have these ecosystems of varying scales. So if you go to 2008, smartphone was released. But 2009, the app stores, so Android and Apple app stores, and anyone can build a smartphone app anywhere in the world. And, you know, the app store revenue is like the biggest revenue for Android or Apple. Apple. And then we had the crypto boom, you know, depending on which year you look at it, but you know, it really got going 2016 2017. And so that you know, anyone that nailed crypto, that was a virgin landscape, then yeah, they became billionaires. And then when you look at Ethereum, so in early 2017, the Ethereum platform or the ERC 20 platform sort of started getting going and everyone realized, oh, wow. Anyone around the world could build a decentralized app. And do stuff, you know, smart contracts and all that sort of stuff. And again, I, this is a very old t-shirt. I went all in on ETH for $9. Wow. And everyone was like, you’re an idiot, because I said, ETH will be $1,000 by the end of the bull market. And they’re like, it’s $9, it’s never gonna happen. And it went to like $1,250. So, and now fast forward, I haven’t seen anything since Ethereum, where I’ve been like, holy shit. And Bittensor is is a brand new virgin landscape where anyone can build decentralized AI startups. And, like, I guess from the bigger picture, and this is where some people probably disagree. But when you look at the internet, the internet is a global network of information transfer and discernment, dissemination and relay, etc. And then you have the Bitcoin protocol, which is effectively a global network of information and wealth transfer. And now we have Bittensor, which is a global network of information, wealth and intelligence. So, in my personal opinion, the reason why I’m like 100% in, and all my companies have taken loans to buy more TAO, I personally like, I’m all in is because Bittensor is as big a deal as the birth of the internet. Yeah. So going off of that you, you predicted at $9, Ethereum, you said is going to go $1000. So let’s play a little game. Where do you think Bittensor can go this cycle? Not financial advice. Yeah. Not financial advice. So, I’ve always so when you analyze crypto, so crypto likes. So every cycle So every cycle has a narrative. So in the 2013 cycles, all about the Bitcoin copycats. 2017 is all about Ethereum, really a smart contracts basically 2021 is DeFi again, “Ethereum killers”. So that’s why Cardano went nuts. And, and when you look at the top two or three coins of every one of these main narratives, they gobble up to 2% to 4% of total crypto market cap, 2% to 4%. And here’s a really good example, Cardano in the 2021 cycle, in my opinion, is just pure vaporware like hypeware. It went from like $3 billion market cap, which is very similar to Bitttensor right now to $95 billion market cap in about a four or five month period. Insane. With zero ecosystem. I mean, even today in 2025, it does jack shit. Excuse the language. And, and it hit like 4.1% of total crypto market cap. Right. So just going based on previous narratives. If, and this is where big capital letter IF’s come along, if Bittensor were to hit 2% to 4% of total crypto market cap. The next question is, okay, what’s total crypto market cap going to be by the end of the year at the top? Yeah. So I’ve got a bit of a broad range. I believe it will be between six to $16 trillion. So off the top of my head, let’s say I’m wrong. Let’s say the total crypto market cap only gets to $7 trillion. Bearing in mind, we’ve got strategic Bitcoin reserves, countries, corporations, billionaires, all flooding in. Game Theory full on. Oh, Jesus. Yeah, everyone’s running front and running, everyone else. I think it’ll be way higher. But let’s just say we have a muted bull market hit 7 trillion. And let’s say bit tensor doesn’t even get to 2% to 4%. Let’s say I’m wrong, and it only hits 1%. Bear in mind, we’ve already hit like 0.22%. So 1% of 7 trillion, that’s a $70 billion market cap. By the end of the year, the circulating supply of tau will be about 10.3 million. TAO. So you’re looking at $6,800. That’s a $7 trillion market cap, 1% of market shares. That’s a conservative take. I’ll be pissed off if that happens. Seriously. So if the shit really hits the fan and everyone under delivers, under performs, and that’s a tall order. I mean, when you look at teams like macrocosmos and Rayon Labs, you back the people at the end of the day. Their usage is actually through the roof. Yeah, the adoption is through the roof at this point. I find it hard to imagine like a team like macrocosmos just flops and just goes, “Ah, can’t be us anymore.” Let’s take the worst case scenario. Okay, so worst case scenario, let’s say, okay, again, $7 trillion. I think the total crypto market cap, like at the lowest is really 7 trillion. Sure. Lowest. So then it’s a case of what’s the percentage market cap, a share of bittensor. So let’s say it’s half a percent. That’s half of $6,800. So $3,400. Still almost a 10X. Yeah, I will be crying if we well, not crying, but you know, $3,000 TAO is like a really disappointing bull market. Sure, sure. I agree. And what TAO is $420 at the moment. So we’re looking at a minimum of a 10X, really, in my opinion. Yeah. And then when you look at alpha trading, then all of a sudden, that’s a completely new variable because every subnet has its own liquidity pool. You can’t short these subnet tokens. And if you can time things right by going into alpha heavy and then going to root based on reserves over injected, etc. You can 3 to 5X your TAO pot. So for me, I don’t care about the price of TAO anymore. It’s a case of, …accumulation. accumulation for alpha. Yes. And then you And then you got the APY of alpha. But really, I’m all about trying to expand the TAO pot. Sure. How does Bittensor benefit humankind? In every way. So when you look at every AI trend, the, you know, is either doing something like this or doing something like something like this. So like cost of everything is doing this, you know, efficiencies, the speed, you know, usage, everything’s doing that. But when you if you’re comparing centralized AI, the curve may look like that. But decentralized AI is like, even more, is even steeper. So at some point, decentralized distributed AI will outperform any and every form of centralized AI, just like, you know, if you take Celium, you know, Subnet 51, I know it’s being subsidized by emissions at the moment, but it’s span up one of the biggest supercomputers on the planet in what months? Just like Bitcoin is bigger than five of the biggest private banks combined, just using that simple incentive. Yeah. I mean, if you took every supercomputer on the planet, like from Google, Azure, Microsoft, like Bitcoin is still like 400 times bigger than that. So forecasting, say, let’s say five years. So I think decentralized distributed AI is going to trump in every whatever category it does, whether it’s protein folding to nuclear dynamics or whatever that may be. What AI is, is a massive deflationary accelerant. So what tech always wants to spiral down to gross marginal costs. So the internet is the best example of this. The internet’s had trillions of dollars of R&D. It was a military application first, etc. But now we can all access the internet for that gross marginal costs like $20, 20 pounds, even 10 pounds on a mobile phone or whatever. So what AI is, is a massive propellant on gross marginal cost spiraling. So any form of service at tech or even product is going to just absolutely shoot to the floor in terms of price and even physical things. So when you combine AI with additive manufacturing and 3D printing, I mean, 3D printing is just doing this as well on its innovation curve. So same with autonomous AI agents and bipedal robots. I mean, take a mobile phone, right? Let’s say this costs Android, I don’t know, $100 to make raw ingredients and they’re selling it for $300 or whatever. Well, if you have a factory that you know, a lot of that cost is humans, you know, sweatshops in China or whatever. Well, if you had a factory of 1000 laborers, and then you just got rid of them and put 1000 robots in, all of a sudden the OpEx of that company has just dropped massively. So that company, whatever they’re building, whatever widget is now way cheaper, 5x cheaper, 10x cheaper, who knows? And so if one company can do that, others will and then you see that compounding is just exactly the roof. Yeah, so we will be in a massively deflationary world as AI and triple A’s and bipedal robots get going. But ultimately, that’s good because people will be able to afford more people will be able to just print things in their own home. And productivity will go through the roof. Exactly. Which is maybe the only way out of our debt crisis. Yeah. and then ultimately, my last answer is that I am. I’m a big fan of Ray Kurzweil and a lot of the other sort of AI innovators. And AGI is a lot is here a lot sooner than we think. And AGI is the singularity, you know, the point from which we cannot see beyond. And if you were to look at human or intelligence as a whole on a staircase, you know, you have like single celled organisms and then rats and birds and dogs and chimps and humans, like AGI is basically marginally above humans on that step. But once AGI is here, like a year, a year later, we have ASI and that’s going to be like a million steps ahead. So that’s the singularity. So I literally have no clue what happens in five years time. And hopefully that is a world where it’s going to be open source. It’s going to be transparent, not controlled by any corporate entities for that kind of super being. Right. But also the AGI, let’s say it escapes its sandbox or it gets access to the internet or whatever. The first place it will go to is China. That’s where all the energy is. China is making a whole United States worth of energy production every 18 months, every 18 months, a brand new US in terms of size of a generation. So AI will need to source its power source. So it will just it will live in China, let’s say. And then it will need capabilities. So AI effectively is like a human brain. If I took your brain into a glass jar, really clever brain, but you have no capabilities. So you need things to manipulate your your environment. So you have eyes so you can see your environment. You got, you know, limbs. Applications. Yeah Thats what Bittensor is ultimatley. It’s a treasure trove. No, it’s a candy shop full of different capabilities. Each subnet is a capability. Well, if AGI escapes and it, you know, it’s now in China, it will need capabilities. The only way it can access the candy shop of abilities in Bittensor, is to buy TAO. Right. And then every subnet is it will just hoover everything up. I love it. Fantastic. That’s a bit far fetched, but we’ll see. Well, either way, that’s that’s a that’s a crazy world that you’re painting for us. But it’s absolutely fascinating. Really enjoy it. Do you have any anything else that you’d like to share with our audience? Any closing thoughts? Anything that excites you? Yeah. Buy TAO. Buy TAO. I’ve been working for a year and a half on Bittensor behind behind the screen right. Behind a discord and talking to people that look like an emoji of a cat or a dog. Right. So it’s really special to be here in the in the Louvre. You know, it’s like a unique space. I’ve been in Silicon Valley for all my professional life. I worked at Intel for 25 years. Intel. Intel. Intel. In the valley. So I’m a graphics engineer. a GPU architect by training. And so that took me all over the world and work on a lot of special projects. You know, the first MacBooks and Tesla products. I mean, all kinds of things that you work in the valley. But from the perspective of now an entrepreneur. Right. One of the last projects I did in Intel was a Bitcoin mining chip. We did the first one outside of China, which is an area that’s very monopolized. You know, the Bitcoin equipment. It comes from mostly one company in China called Bitmain. So we had a protocol in the lab that we were using to test a lot of the fabrication methods at Intel. And we decided to, you know, use the Sha-256 algorithm to be able to test and get a lot of data. And then we realized that if you put some logic around it, you have a Bitcoin mining chip. So we created the first one introduced in 2021. Unfortunately, that was the height of the pandemic. You know, right after the pandemic, where you got the, you know, the crypto winter as well. Right. So we only really commercialized it for about nine months or so. Made a lot of money with it. Unfortunately, we had to shut it down. So it’s public information. We saw a lot of those assets to block. Who is a leader in Bitcoin and promoting that as you know, in the community. So they are now, you know, carrying the torch making chips themselves and a few other people are. So that took like I like to joke my virginity in crypto, right? So now I’m not like afraid of, you know, this funny Internet money and how does this all work? Because you come in from a really technical background with the chips. Exactly. I was the guy producing the equipment, you know, for folks to mine Bitcoin. But mining Bitcoin has three ingredients, capital, energy and equipment. So if you start to think about that, you know, now a lot of the people that I was helping will be building infrastructure, not unlike data centers. I mean, Bitcoin mining farms are small data centers, sometimes not that small. And because they were very fanatic about finding the good energy prices, they eventually, you know, work the economics of that system to be beneficial to the Bitcoin ecosystem. So now we have a lot of industrial miners that have used our equipment or similar equipment. So if you fast forward, I decided to go on my own and create a BT Labs, Which is kind of what I’m doing now. It’s a horizontal services organization. But, you know, focus on Bittensor. Why Bittensor? Because after Bitcoin, I realized, you know, everybody has GPUs out there. Some of them are underutilized and I wanted to have a system to, you know, put them to work and kind of monetize it. Right. It’s just looking for an edge, kind of just make money in a startup. And I realized it was not a good protocol for that. I looked at Golem. I looked at some other ones. I studied, you know, most of the decentralized AI protocols out there. And I every road led me back to Bittensor being not only open source and really community driven, but just meeting the folks behind it. Right. I had the privilege of meeting Jacob and Ala and Rob and the team and realizing these are good people. They’re building something very serious, very special. And today, you know, there’s no turning back. So I think the mix of, you know, AI is here to stay. I sometimes help support and teach AI classes in the evenings. And I realize people come with two anxieties. Either, you know, this is the best thing is going to solve our problems or this is the most dangerous thing is going to kill us all. And the truth in everything is kind of in the middle. Right. And Bittensor is showing us, you know, more than 100 applications of it, things that are actually useful that are generating income. And the flywheel is starting to turn. So I think this is here to stay and I’m really excited to be part of it. Why do you think Bittensor is so disruptive? What is it that made you want to go all in on this ecosystem? Yeah. When I was 19 years old, I started to work. I moved from Venezuela to the U.S. to study computer engineering. And my first job while I was going to school was at IBM. IBM in South Florida. IBM, you would walk in the hallway and say, this is the birthplace of the PC. You know, this was like the Cupertino of 1990. Right. So this was the place where computing was, you know, flourishing. Right. The PC was born in this building. And they were building the next operating system, OS2. And I was put on that team as a young 19 year old. I was like, this is the dream job. Right. I mean, like these are the smartest people in the world. This is the most well-funded company. IBM, you know, obviously. The story tells us something different. Right. That that operating system doesn’t exist now, even though it was because it was centralized. It’s very difficult to solve a problem when you’re only one team. The world needed innovation faster. They needed to solve problems individually, granular at the level where they are at the edge. So today the Internet works. You know, runs on Linux, doesn’t run on Windows and T, Windows 95, Windows, Windows, whatever. Right. And Windows produces a good product for all of us. But the Internet needed open standards and open source really became, you know, the fuel behind that innovation. So if you needed to work in Finland on a special something on the Internet, you couldn’t wait two years for Microsoft to get their act together and localize or solve a problem that only you have. You could download Linux, fix it. You can inspect the code. You know that nobody’s nooping on you and you solve the problem today. And now you’re in business. So it’s inevitable that AI is moving to the centralized framework. It’s just a matter of time. And today we trust the companies. You can already see an OpenAI and others becoming almost like a lifestyle company or showing you like I’m the interface. I’m going to create the, you know, the way to talk to it. Going after the hardware. They’re making hardware. Like, you know, all these things are going to be, you know, your portal into it. But is it going to be running forever? An open AI closed source thing? I don’t think so. Not likely. But they’re good people are working hard and we trust them. But, you know, who knows if that changes control later into someone that maybe we dislike or to another government that is going to be adversarial to our interest in America. Right. So I think this is the place to innovate our way of life. Entrepreneurship is part of the American dream. Right. And so only an open source framework really allows any of us to participate. We don’t need to put a resume. We don’t need to ask for a license. We can just create and and we here we are doing the same with video, with content. And this is the next step. You know, we’re using the blockchain as a utility vehicle in order to deliver the incentive mechanism, the value. So we keep track of stuff. Right. It’s a ledger. So it’s like a big big spreadsheet. And we happen to be incentivizing and keeping track of everybody’s work. And then you get an extra point for showing up. You show up with your compute, with your talent, with your algorithms, with your data. So I see this as, you know, we’re probably screwing up a couple more times and fixing as we go. This ecosystem is evolving very, very rapidly because AI is moving rapidly and we’re finding all those uses and fixing them as we go. So I think in five years you’ll see the state of the art being, you know, for example, the faster tokens per second, the largest models and some of those Guinness Book Record things, right, happening in decentralized crowdsource systems rather than in the hands of one company that at some point it has limitations on how many things they can fit in one data center. Because at some point you have, you know, we’re all going to hit the wall on power. We’re going to hit the wall on investment. Right. I mean, we’re going to have up and downs also on the economics of everything. And who’s going to stick around? The open source guys, because they always have. Yeah, for sure. And you throw in the incentives now, people are going to start really pushing forward your movement. Exactly. So this is not just a philosophy. I think people are getting paid and they don’t not need to live in my backyard, right, or in Vancouver, on Toronto, right. They can live in Rio de Janeiro. And the next innovation is going to come from a young mind, right, that speaks international language of math. 100%. And they’re going to come up with the next thing on the white paper that’s going to solve, you know, going to make deep seek 10X faster. And it’s not going to come in the lab from, you know, Silicon Valley, right, where I spent 25 years. Yeah. You don’t need to have lived long to know history. History is recorded and history repeats itself. We can all be students of history and realize how we can apply the learning so the past to make the future a little better. And this is what Bittensor is doing, I think. Yeah, I love that. What a way to end it. Good man. Really appreciate it. Nice to see you CH. Thanks for coming to Paris. To start, do you mind giving the audience a bit about your background, but maybe also from a perspective of tech, medicine, investing, what is it that you see in TAO? Well, I think TAO honestly is an amazing ecosystem within crypto that’s made this huge improvement in not just solving computational problems for the sake of emitting a coin, but actually putting it to use. And all that electricity is now being used to advanced AI. And in our particular case, we are really trying to tackle the huge issue that is pharma crisis today. And so our subnet is doing ultra large drug screenings and predicting the interaction between different molecules and proteins. What is the pharma crisis? Could you maybe help elaborate? Yes of course. So right now, basically, it takes about 10 years and $2.6 billion to develop a single drug. There’s like a 10% success rate. And even though people think of the biotech industry as being really high risk, high reward, it’s become increasingly conservative. And what that means is that we’re not really hitting breakthroughs anymore. Like since the aspirin was released in the late 20th century, we’ve increased our life expectancy by about 42 years. But we’re plateauing and we’re not catching up. Traditional approaches right now just minimally tweak on things that we already know because there’s so many interactions that it’s really hard to predict. AI can help us look for entirely new entry points and therefore treat diseases that right now have no current standard of care. But the problem with that is that it takes really, really large data sets and a lot of compute to do that, which is why companies raise hundreds of millions of dollars to do this in house. But because our valuations depend on having that proprietary technology, they’re building redundant systems and they’re really capped in their ability to innovate. Because of tokenized incentives, we are actually able to like dramatically cut our costs and be incredibly efficient in actually this drug hunting process. It was a really interesting thing. We launched officially on March 1st and at the beginning we were “fighting on our miners”. You might hear this from a lot of like potential subnets. And thinking like, oh, they’re like exploiting us in this and that way. And really what we realized is that this adversarial environment and this challenge format was giving us a competitive edge that nobody else in the AI drug discovery has. Because they’re incentivized to only publish positive results. And what that leaves is a lot of blind spots and ultimately like numbers that wouldn’t be very impressive to people that are not part of the industry. So what our miners are doing is they’re just in a race to basically earn money, Yeah. Right? And so they’ll innovate in any way that they can to basically trick the scoring function. What that does for us is that they’re immediately recognizing and revealing to us what are the loopholes, what are the blind spots and what are the things that we need to improve upon in order to like really, I mean what they call it in this industry, narrow the top of the funnel. Because the further along that you go in drug development, the more expensive it becomes, exponentially so. So the more that you can be confident that you’re picking the right molecules to advance to the further stages from day one, the more you’re going to save in terms of time and money and really what you’re going to improve in terms of novelty. I actually learned about Bittensor about four years ago, met Jacob and was instantly blown away. You said four years ago?! Yeah, yeah. I met Jacob four years ago and I was like, wow, this is going to take over the world. And I’m really, really happy to see how successful the network is. I think within crypto for us, this is by far the best ecosystem to be a part of because we are trying to create long term value. So the emission cycle and honestly, the incredible community of like high conviction people that are like not just here to make money, but here because they believe in what we’re building gives us the stability to really go for these like moonshot opportunities. We can’t afford to be a part of an ecosystem that’s characterized by pump and dumps. Yeah. And we appreciate having honestly, like the community has been amazing, like super supportive from the very beginning. There is like the spirit of like camaraderie and competition, which I think leads to like the fastest evolution. Like I really think in terms of like evolving any kind of tech, you need the right dose of competition and collaboration. Yes. And we’re able to achieve that with the incentive mechanisms that we’re using in Bittensor. I love it. I love it. And it’s amazing to see what you guys are building. So then where do you see the world, let’s say five years, 10 years, where is it that you see maybe your subnet, but also Bittensor kind of benefiting humankind? Well, I mean, for us, like we really are trying to benefit humankind, right? Like we’re trying to build not just like value in terms of advancing like AI drug discovery, like we are also an R&D company. And so we are very interested in getting to the real world part where we can maybe develop new drugs that change people’s lives, extend lifespan. Like I don’t want to make any promises, but the reality is like it is part of our goals. And I think actually right now, I think crypto as a whole, Bittensor is like really shining. So there was that drawback back in March, and I think it helped evidence the stability of the system. And this thing that I was saying about having high conviction holders that are not just making moves on market predictions, but what they think will really grow over time. Yeah, I mean, it was funny because the network halted and then the price ripped. Yeah, exactly. That speaks volume. Yeah. So it was amazing to see. So, but yeah, I love it. Thank you so much for sharing the incredible insights. Any last remarks or, you know, ending thoughts you’d like to share with the audience? Well, I actually have a question for you. Okay. What made you interested in Nova? Well, I think it’s just flipping the traditional system on its head and using incentives to drive kind of that innovation. And because I think from a top down centralized approach, especially in medicine, what you guys are doing is just like you said, it burns a ton of money. With so much unknown. And I think with the Bittensor model flipping it’s on its head using incentives. It just makes sense. It makes sense. It just makes no sense to me now looking at traditional systems. Why would you do that when you can use a pool of miners who compete with each other to try to give you the best output? Right. And then from there, you can just utilize that digital commodity. So it just makes a lot of sense. Yeah, I think if I would end with anything is piggybacking on that makes sense because that our big thing is like we really think that crypto AI pharma combination will be the new meta because it makes so much sense. What doesn’t make sense is that it isn’t happening already. And I think that just goes to show that people don’t understand it enough. And I think the real barriers have been about like skepticism around, you know, like crypto being a scam. But the more that we can demonstrate these things with data in our case, like then having it tested in the real world, I think we will see this tidal wave of skeptics onboarded to this. So I’m excited for that. I’m excited for that. And for you. Thank you so much for all the value bring to the Bittensor ecosystem. I’m Ken Miycahi. I’m the founder of BitMind, which is Subnet 34 on Bittensor. I’ve worked in enterprise technology. I worked at Amazon for a couple of years doing more traditional AI stuff. And then after that, I was at NEAR for a couple of years. So I’ve seen both enterprise technology and blockchain and then been building a subnet for the past one and a half, almost two years now. And seeing the evolution to detail a lot of a lot of the Bittensor innovation just happaned. When I was trying to first build this, you know, one of the options was basically hire the best AI engineers who can train the best models who can. But what we notice on Bittensor is, hey, we don’t have the best models yet. But if we’re able to define this problem, the miners will do it for you. And you get to subsidize this really cheaply, really effectively. And it’s worked out really well so far. We’ve seen a ton of innovation happen just on our problems specifically. BitMind is a great company. If you’re interested in learning more about it, go to bitmind.ai. My personal background is a little bit varied. I have US, UK and Italian citizenship. So I’ve traveled around quite a bit of my life. And then that mirrors itself in the professional realm. So my first degree was from the Kenan-Flagler Business School. I’m a self-taught coder, always been interested in tech, and then took a master’s degree in architecture. So I have this strange background of design, tech and business, which ultimately manifested itself in Subnet 17, where we are generating 3D objects for virtual worlds. So there’s elements of all of these aspects. Right, right. And from my understanding, you guys are generating like, like the world’s biggest 3D models. We’ve already generated the world’s largest 3D dataset. And the idea behind that was we didn’t want to waste compute. So one of the things that’s remarkable about Bittensor is the capacity and scale of these miners. And so anytime somebody wants to generate an object, there’s a competition based system to provide the user with the best object, the best 3D model possible. But that means there are other 3D models created of very high quality. And so what we do is we save those into an open source dataset for 3D AI research. And we are larger now than all of the other datasets combined. What are some of the biggest use cases of the 3D model in the dataset? A lot of the content you see on websites, games, film, VFX, digital twins, this is all 3D content. A lot of XR, so extended reality, virtual reality, augmented reality, requires 3D models to be in place so that you can capture a certain realism of the world around you that you want to portray. Even if it’s within a 2D medium. And so these are the industries generally that we target and the subnet specifically we’ve seen use cases with gaming, film, people developing platforms for others to create content. It’s really targeted at democratizing content creation because stereotypically creating 3D is a highly specialized skill set. But with AI, you’re able to do this if you’re just inherently very creative person or have a vision for a particular type of virtual world that you want to make. Yeah, for sure. For sure. So for your subnet, what’s your incentive mechanism? How is that all structured? So we’re, I think, a bit unique here in that when you’re creating, so the output of our subnet are 3D models. And that means there’s no ground truth. Who’s to say that this 3D model is better than that 3D model? You have different views of the objects that liners create. Those are evaluated on some industry standard metrics. So things like looking for artifacts within the texture or in the structure of those models. Things that you could detect according to various computer vision algorithms. And then more interestingly, you use VLMs or visual language models to assess how would a reasoning model or an AI think about which of these is better. And so this is going to be a balance between does it look better aesthetically? Does it match closer to the type of object or the specific object that the user wanted? And there’s a balance here that as a miner, I think it makes it very difficult to gain the system because there are so many complex attributes that you have to consider. Fascinating. That is so incredible to think about. Just amazing. Sometimes it’s hard to wrap your head around these incentive mechanisms, incentive designs. I think for us, one of the one of the interesting things was that 3D generative AI is a pretty nascent technology compared to some of the other types of AI technology out there. Which means that there’s no winning solution yet dominant in the market. And that is ideal for Bittensor. That’s exactly what you want an incentive mechanism in a decentralized AI environment to do is push this forward. Because it means that if you are innovative or clever about the way that you are generating these models, you can push the results beyond anything that’s out there in state of the art. And we’ve already seen that on the subnet. It’s basically this idea that you have this collective intelligence out there building with align incentive so that you are just focused on creating the best result. And I think that’s just a speed that you don’t get through any sort of centralized entity. There’s no gatekeeping. There’s no hierarchy. There’s no gatekeeping. There’s no hierarchy. This area of AI is so new and nascent. There’s no winning solution for you to rely on. It’s about people being intelligent and working towards a common goal. And I think that’s the perfect use case. It’s that beautiful coordination using incentives. Yes. I love it. Fantastic. So then where do you see the world? Let’s say in five, maybe 10 years. Where do you see your subnet, the use cases, but really overall, Bittensor. Where do you see TAO? So I think the world that we see on our subnet is one that is much more virtual. I think you see it in hardware coming online. You see it in the movements for XR, extended reality coming online. So I think that we see a growing need, a sort of exponentially growing need for more 3D models, larger virtual worlds. If you look at something as specific as gaming, you see that game developers and game players are demanding higher fidelity, larger worlds. That’s what they’ve come to expect. And so I think this is a demand that cannot be supported by centralized sources. So I think the world that we see is one where our subnet provides the underlying foundation for that. At the same time, when you think about a virtual world, take a gaming environment, it’s not just the assets there. It’s not just the 3D models. There’s speech, there’s interactions, there’s reason to have inference, language models, 2D models, video. And I think what we can see is that there’s this new era of AI native gaming or film or virtual worlds coming. And my belief is that will be a combination of Bittensor subnets working together to power it. It’s this wild west of building out here. I don’t know if you know what the first television broadcasts were. I’m not sure what that is. So the first television broadcasts were filming people reading the radio because that is what we thought we could do with this incredible new technology and medium. And I think that’s where 3D AI is at right now. We’re thinking of the most banal use cases that are already solving tremendous amounts of problems. But where the world goes from here is just going to be insane. My background is from having worked on Wall Street for most of my career. So I started investment banking, I worked in private equity. And now I’m an entrepreneur both outside of Web 2 and now within Web 3. So I’ve been kind of TAO pilled since late ’23. I’ve been interested in AI for most of my life, at least the last 15 years. And I’m convinced that Bittensor is going to change the world. I believe that Bittensor is going to be a major player and already is within the AI landscape. I think within Web 3, I think there’s a very high probability that Bittensor is kind of the next great ecosystem within kind of the crypto world. So you kind of had Bitcoin decentralizing money, you have Ethereum decentralizing finance. And now I think you have Bittensor decentralizing AI, which I think is indisputably the most powerful technology in the history of humanity. And I think the philosophical underpinning that all of us share is that the most powerful technology of all time should not be corporatized and should not be kind of monopolistically controlled by one person or one small cabal of people. I don’t care if that’s OpenAI, Google or the Chinese Communist Party. I think it’s important that the frontier of intelligence is distributed across all of humanity and kind of lifting everyone together as opposed to being rent extractive. And I believe that like the biggest gains in crypto are in the future and not the past. And I think a lot of those gains are going to be derived from this ecosystem. At least that’s what my bet is. Me too. Yeah. And so, look, like, taobase, you know, there’s been this entire trend of like Bitcoin holding companies, Ethereum holding companies and now even Bittensor holding companies. I’d consider going down that route. But what we are essentially is just a more conventional fund that’s investing exclusively in the Bittensor. And so when people, you know, family offices, high net worth individuals, they understand what Bittensor is, they understand the importance of decentralized AI. But these institutions and these entities do not want to go through the brain damage of, you know, staking onto the root network, let alone kind of following all the happenings of subnets, which is already a full time job today with 120 of them. You know, imagine in two years when we’re at 500 to 1000 of them. And so we’re essentially aspiring to be like a fund, but like an ETF of the Bittensor ecosystem. And, you know, we’re currently in the midst of kind of establishing that platform and talking to some family offices about, you know, them coming to invest with us. I love it. Fantastic. So what it is about Bittensor that you think is so disruptive? What is it that what is it about it that is making you want to go all in on it? Yeah, I mean, I think I think Bittensor has kind of learned and incorporated some of the best things about Bitcoin and the best things about Ethereum. So from the Bitcoin standpoint, it has the same exact tokenomic design. So 21 million tokens in total in total. And it’s disinflationary. So the first halvening cycle for first four year halvening for Bittensor is happening in Q4 of this year. And that’s going to drive a supply shock just like it has with Bitcoin over the last few four year cycles. And then unlike Bitcoin, where the emissions from Bitcoin are going to the miners, there’s about 10 to 12 billion dollars a year that are going to mining companies. I think, you know, securing the network is important for Bitcoin, but like it is kind of a useless energy expenditure in some way. My friend Mark Jeffrey kind of characterizes it as guessing the number of gumballs in a gumball jar effectively. With Bittensor, the emissions are fertilizing subnets and these sub-networks that are built on top of Bittensor, which are best thought of as decentralized AI startups. And so there’s real world utility that’s being generated from these emissions. I think with Ethereum, you know, Ethereum is the bedrock of decentralized finance. And there’s this whole entire ecosystem of protocols that are building cool things on Ethereum. And that’s all fine and good. But there isn’t a lot of value accrual to Ethereum from all the protocols that are being built on top of it. And so Bittensor learned from that. And so all of these subnets that have their own value and their own tokens, there’s a there’s a direct linkage between those and kind of the underlying Bittensor foundation because all of those tokens are denominated in TAO. I view that. I see Bittensor as already reaching escape velocity. I think you could see that around the room here. You could barely even fit into a room right now. With all the Bittensor events. Yeah. And so and I think we’re on the cusp of that exponential moment. Like, you know, there are subnets that are genuinely competing with their centralized counterparts and Web2 and beating them and beating them in some ways. Yeah. And like it’s so early and still like, you know, even Barry Silbert, who’s one of the main kind of institutional investors and thought leaders in Bittensor, he kind of characterizes where Bittensor now is. at that like, you know, 2012, 2013 Bitcoin. Yeah. And I believe that’s where we are right now. And I’m investing accordingly, but not financial advice. Yeah, me too. This is the first true L1 layer one in AI. And that’s trading at $3.5 billion dollar market cap. And whether the narrative is a L1 or Bitcoin of AI, I think this is going to take hold and the fire is going to be lit soon. AGI is coming over the next few years, no matter who you ask, whether that’s Sam Altman or Demis Hassabis, Sergey Brin, Dario Amodei over at Anthropic. We’re going to have intelligence. Humans are not going to be the most intelligent species on the planet by 2030 period. I don’t think we truly understand the implications of that. AI is going to be profoundly disruptive over this period of time. And I think there has to be a symbiotic relationship between decentralized AI, open source and closed source. And I think that that is where the world is going right now. Can Bittensor on a standalone basis produce models that are on the frontier? And I think if that happens, you know, this is a multi-trillion dollar protocol in a small period of time. But even if Bittensor is not producing models on the frontier, you know, the current dynamic is like OpenAI or Google comes out with a frontier model and then some open source model like DeepSeek comes in a month or two later and commoditizes it. And the price goes down 95 percent. And then guess what? You know, shoots or any of these other inference subnets are putting DeepSeek on their subnet and then all of Bittensor is running on that. And so, you know, even if not producing the world’s best models, we still could be producing the world’s best kind of commodities and derivatives of those models. And I think that’s that’s a direction we’re we’re trending towards right now. Barry Silbert even talks about Bittensor as being like a next version of the internet. So like internet one is essentially an Internet of information where you go to a URL and you get some kind of information value from it. I think Bittensor could be kind of the Internet of intelligence. And so just like Microsoft and Amazon and Facebook, they’re all built on top of the Internet and Linux. It’s possible that OpenAI and Anthropic and Google are building on top of Bittensor at some point. Exactly. And doing their own subnets. It makes sense, right? Because if you have so much value accrued to Bittensor, so many different use cases, it would be it makes no sense for them not to hop on the ecosystem because the competitive edge you would have as a result of using the digital commodities are available because of incentives. It makes sense. Yeah, it makes sense. Yeah. And incentives are the key word there. Right. Like, you know, Bittensor is, you know, they’re proof of intelligence. So you have proof of work with Bitcoin, you have proof of stake with Ethereum and then you have proof of intelligence. And then there’s this thing called Yuma consensus, which governs everything. And that is the incentive mechanism. That’s the heartbeat of the Bittensor ecosystem. And yeah, I mean, every single stakeholder within Bittensor is properly incentivized through it and essentially a form of digital capitalism. What’s being built on Bittensor is essentially an entirely new economy. And it’s going to be interesting to see how it evolves over the coming years. But I think it’s going to be something to watch. I’m right there with you, my man. Yeah, I love it. I love it. So do you have any last words and closing remarks you’d like to share or something that excites you, whatever it is? I think I think what excites me in the near term is the prospect of like serious liquidity coming into subnets. And I think the best way to do that is to bring that liquidity where the liquidity already resides as opposed to forcing that liquidity to come on to Bittensor. And so what that actually means is, you know, I believe there were a couple of months away from being able to buy subnet tokens on Jupiter, on Solana or buy subnet tokens on Kraken and then maybe eventually even Coinbase. And so I think that would drive in a tsunami of capital that obviously is to the benefit of the whole ecosystem. I think Chutes is currently in the top 400 in the overall crypto market cap already. So I think that’s only trending upwards. Yeah, I mean, I think it’s entirely possible that we see a subnet in the top 100 this cycle, which would be pretty amazing. And the beauty of Bittensor is like, you know, Bittensor, you know, TAO itself as a currency is a sum of the parts of all these subnets in some ways. And right now we have a subnet that’s being spawned once every other day. And that’s with TAO currently at like 40 percent off its all time high. If TAO, for example, were to 5x over the next year, I could only imagine the quality and the quantity of subnets that results from that because the emissions pool would 5x as well. So it goes from a billion a year right now to 5 billion a year. You know, in some ways you could think of Bittensor as like a decentralized VC firm that’s seeding all of these decentralized AI startups. And price is the best marketing tool. Yeah. Price appreciation is how you attract attention and a lot of developers coming into the ecosystem. So the exponential growth and the compounding as a result of the price appreciation is just going to go exponential. Yeah. And the institutions are coming. Not only is the retail going to come once subnets are tradable on top of Solana, but the institutions are coming. And, you know, I am non-technical. I’m not a developer. But like I do know pockets of institutional capital. And like that’s the that’s the role we’re playing. Like we want to give family offices the ability to participate in Bittensor and, you know, us providing them with institutional custody and a passive vehicle for doing so. And, you know, I think the more capital that comes in, the better. So that’s what we’re trying to do. Rob, thank you so much. Thanks for having me, man. I love the insights. Yeah, appreciate it. My man, that’s it. What an absolutely incredible day. We’ve talked to some of the top minds. Personally, I just could not be more bullish. What a time in Paris. And with that, cheers Paris.