Bittensor (TAO) price, chart and history
Bittensor is $290.17, down 6.29% in the last 24 hours. Market value $3.29 billion, rank #37.
About Bittensor
Bittensor is a blockchain network that pays people for artificial intelligence work, such as training or running models, supplying data or providing computing power. It is split into many specialised subnets, each run as an ongoing competition: miners produce results, validators score them, and the network hands out its TAO token according to those scores. TAO is also staked behind validators and helps decide how rewards are shared between subnets.
The idea came from Jacob Steeves, a former Google engineer, who formally started the project with Ala Shaabana in 2019 through the Opentensor Foundation. The network went live in January 2021 with no presale, no investor allocation and no pre-mined coins, so every TAO has been earned by taking part. It moved to its own independent chain in 2023. In February 2026 both founders stepped down from their executive roles while staying involved.
Its reward system, Yuma Consensus, is designed to pay for useful AI output rather than for solving puzzles. Like Bitcoin, TAO is capped at 21 million, with new issuance cut in half about every four years; the first cut came in December 2025. Critics question how much subnet activity reflects real demand rather than reward chasing, note that large stakers carry heavy influence, and recall a 2024 wallet theft that forced the chain to pause.
- Created by
- Jacob Steeves and Ala Shaabana (Opentensor Foundation)
- Launched
- January 2021
- How it's secured
- Its own chain, run by validators who stake TAO and score miners via Yuma Consensus
- Supply
- Capped at 21 million TAO; issuance halved in December 2025