Montreal's Exploit Summit crowned a winner: physics AI project Carbon took Pitchtensor 2026 and pulled in 500 TAO in under 20 minutes, with a subnet launch next on the roadmap. Elsewhere, SN9 (Iota) got attention for productizing decentralized training with a pipeline-parallel design, Opentensor listed a new subnet, and the community floated a 'gamma token' mechanism for subnet-specific stablecoins.
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4 reports
01 / DAILY
Carbon wins Pitchtensor, Exploit Summit wraps in Montreal
Exploit Summit ran two days in Montreal across the OTF and RAO tracks. Day two closed with a stated pivot toward working products, better incentive design, research infrastructure, and business development. Carbon, a physics AI network where miners build models and validators test their trustworthiness, won Pitchtensor 2026 and raised 500 TAO in under 20 minutes. The project is now positioning itself to launch as its own TAO subnet.
02 / DAILY
SN9 (Iota) productizes decentralized training
SN9, branded Iota, lets users rent the network to train custom models — effectively packaging decentralized training as a service. Macrocosmos noted most distributed training today is data-parallel, where every machine holds a full copy of the model, capping size at single-machine capacity. Iota instead splits the model across machines in a pipeline-parallel setup, so maximum model size scales with network size rather than any one machine's limits.
03 / DAILY
New listing: SN80
Opentensor listed SN80, named 'Novelty Search' / OpenRoboto, focused on open, competitive context compression.
04 / QUICK HIT
Community members discussed a proposed 'gamma token' design: a stablecoin-like asset acquired by burning a subnet's ALPHA, redeemable for the subnet's underlying commodity — GPU rental via Lium, for example, or inference/model access. The pitch is an alternative to overpaying miners directly: routing part of miner emissions toward gamma would reserve future compute or inference credits instead of inflating payouts.
Still functions as an emission burn, but has a different price effect than a straight burn
Debate centered on overpaying miners now versus banking credits for later use
