TAO is the native token of Bittensor. It is used for staking, for paying network fees and registrations, and it is the unit in which network emissions are issued. Maximum supply is 21 million.

What is a Bittensor subnet?

A subnet is an independent incentive competition on the network, focused on one kind of digital work such as AI inference or model training, with its own miners, validators and rules.

The protocol is open source and run by the participants. Each subnet is operated by its owner and community, and validators maintain consensus on scores.

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What is Bittensor?

Bittensor is an open network where subnets compete to produce useful digital commodities such as AI models, and are paid in the TAO token. A plain-language overview.

The short version

Bittensor is an open-source, decentralized network that rewards people for producing useful digital work, most prominently machine intelligence. Instead of one company deciding who gets paid for an AI service, the network uses on-chain incentives: participants submit work, other participants score it, and the native token, TAO, is paid out according to the scores.

TAO has a fixed maximum supply of 21 million, and new TAO is released over time as emissions to the participants who contribute.

Subnets: one competition per commodity

The network is divided into subnets. Each subnet is its own competition with its own rules, for example serving text inference, training a model, or collecting data. A subnet is identified by a number, written SN followed by its netuid (for example SN1).

Subnets are created and run by their owners, who define what good work looks like and how it is measured. Daily news about individual subnets is tracked in the subnet index.

The roles

Miners do the work the subnet asks for. Validators evaluate that work and publish scores on-chain. Stakers delegate TAO to validators and share in their rewards. Subnet owners design the incentive mechanism. See how miners, validators and Yuma Consensus work.

How subnets get funded

Since the dTAO upgrade, each subnet has its own token and market, and the share of TAO emissions a subnet receives follows market demand. See what dTAO is.

Where to follow it

Bittensor Daily publishes a bilingual digest every day covering TAO market data, subnet community news, protocol pull requests and releases. This page is background and is not investment advice.

FAQ

What is TAO?: TAO is the native token of Bittensor. It is used for staking, for paying network fees and registrations, and it is the unit in which network emissions are issued. Maximum supply is 21 million.
What is a Bittensor subnet?: A subnet is an independent incentive competition on the network, focused on one kind of digital work such as AI inference or model training, with its own miners, validators and rules.
Who runs Bittensor?: The protocol is open source and run by the participants. Each subnet is operated by its owner and community, and validators maintain consensus on scores.