Bittensor history: AI on Bitcoin's rules
A market for models
Jacob Steeves and Ala Shaabana started Bittensor in 2019 with a simple idea: pay people in a token for useful machine learning work, and let the network judge whose work is useful. The whitepaper was signed with the pseudonym Yuma Rao.
2023: Finney and a fair launch
The main network, called Finney, launched in March 2023. TAO had no presale and no allocation for founders, and miners and validators earned every token. The supply is capped at 21 million, the same as Bitcoin. TAO hit its lowest recorded price of 30.83 dollars on 14 May 2023.
Subnets and dynamic TAO
Bittensor splits work into subnets, each with its own task, such as text generation or price forecasting. In February 2025 the dynamic TAO upgrade gave every subnet its own token, so you can back a specific subnet.
The first halving
TAO reached its all-time high of 757.60 dollars on 7 March 2024. The first halving arrived in December 2025 and cut daily issuance from about 7,200 TAO to 3,600, according to Grayscale. Bittensor times its halvings by total supply; Bitcoin times them by block count.