A week on from @proofoftalk in Paris and catching up with pretty much everyone that operates in Bittensor, I've managed to digest all the vibes and info from all the conversations I had. As well as recover from an almighty 2 day hangover from the last night! As usual, I'm going to focus on the changes/issues Bittensor has (as I care about it and want it to improve). Then will talk about the positives. The following issues are felt by the majority of subnet owners: 1.) Sneak changes. There are patches and changes to the chain every week at the moment. And often every month. All done without a roadmap or forewarning. This is really jarring for investors, institutions and subnet owners to forward plan. This is the main reason big money is tentatively waiting to plough in. It WANTS to, but not until the eco is more stable and predictable! As an eco, let's just have all the changes every 6 months. That way people can plan, there's some expected stability, for at least 6 months and then we all know of the changes and can prepare in advance. Or even have a proper debate about it. 2.) Knee jerk changes. Again, the general consensus is that the powers that be are over-indexing on trying to stamp out the few malicious subnets out there, but the changes do affect and will hurt many other legitimate subnets. For example, there's been a lot of telegraphing that protocol based shorting will be coming. Pretty much no one wants this! It's just going to give big negative whales to create even more profit and volatility within dTAO. One of the biggest selling points of dTAO is that you can only go long! But with the subnet-takeover-function of Conviction AND shorting, we are literally about to lay down on our backs to open ourselves for a right rogering. Seriously OTF, don't bring on shorting. All sorts of negative attack vectors will be opened up. 3.) Driving value to alpha to negate sell-side. So I've been harking on about this for at least a year now. With root prop and the miner/vali/dTAO sellside vectors, a subnet has a tremendous amount of sell side. Especially if a subnet is trying to do good and NOT have a miner burn. This is why MOST subnets have lengthy down only charts, despite doing good stuff. So in order to avoid the price spiral to dereg, subnet owners absolutely cannot rely on the zero-sum-game/pool of dTAO funds as it's hyper rotational and chases the dopamine of announcements. So the only predictable and controllable way to protect price is to either generate a heap of PROFIT in order to do buybacks OR raise capital in the real world to have a protectionary war chest. Suffice to say, it's pushing subnet owners to do the traditional stuff AI start ups have to do in the real world. Let's change root prop to alleviate some sellside! Instead of having alpha be insta-sold into TAO by the chain, just have a PROTOCOL OWNED Alpha Treasury. Sellside is then reduced quite a lot and the protocol itself will benefit from having a wildly appreciating NAV due to the treasury and APY of all alpha. This gives Bittensor way more value and optionality in the future. 4.) Connecting real world acquisition value to alpha holders. A flawed concern that newbies have of Bittensor is that any subnet that does really well is just going to be acquired or gobbled up by a big fish in the real world. And that is true, to an extent. But if a subnet is going to be gobbled up, alpha holders will have had a glorious ride up until that point as the subnet will have had to be doing great things for a while in order to be on an acquisition radars. Like SN44 is right now. So we dTAO investors effectively get to front run big VC firms. And the Bittensor Miner network is a moat in itself. But the real disconnect here is connecting that liquidity event to the alpha. Conviction doesn't really do that. I still think it's a virtue-signalling sugar cube of pundit-appeasement. But what would be good to see from subnets is some sort of public commitment that in the event of an acquisition, a percentage of the cash-payout is directly ploughed into their alpha as a buyback as a way of thanking alpha holders and creating a liquidity event for their loyalty and support. Here's a clunky example, (and with a bit more brain glucose there's sure to be a finessed version), but let's say there's a $50m acquisition of a subnet. Typical $15m upfront and $35m in earnout/performance based ratchets. Of that $15m cash element, the subnet owner could do a 20% single buyback of alpha of $3m . This would create a mega candle and an opportunity for people to choose to sell and have a nice liquidity event or even stay for the longer ride. But at the very least, it's some sort of acquisition linkage to alpha. 5.) Chain bloat. The chain is very bloated in such a short time of operation. It's one of the reasons we can't just open it up to like 256 or 1000 slots. For example, Bitcoin has been running for 15 years and an archival node is only 750-850GB. Ethereum is 10 years old and it's about 900GB. But Bittensor hit 2TB in under 3 years. It's probably close to 3TB now. Substrate has many benefits and has facilitated in the creation of Bittensor as we know it, but it is terrible for storing stuff. Instead, we could do all the "bloaty/storing stuff" on another chain and keep substrate for the clever stuff. Bit like how Hippius uses another chain. I haven't owned any Kaspa in 3 years now, but Kaspa would be PERFECT for this. It's the fastest and most efficient settlement layer on the planet and you can literally write and store stuff into the chain. Bittensor literally couldn't bloat up that chain. It's the perfect match... @const_reborn please please have a zoom with the founder of Kaspa @hashdag You two are God level brains... So...there are some candid personal gripes which many out there feel the same way, based on convos. But now let's focus on the good stuff! The stuff which reaffirms why my whole life is in Bittensor now. ✅ Despite the odd grifter (which you can never stamp out in any eco), the quality of subnets now compared to 12 months ago is remarkably improved! New subnet quality is also improving a lot! Hopefully some of our revenue generating subnets can now start expanding the scale and cadence of buybacks. ✅The level of institutional interest in Bittensor is magnitudes larger than it was last year. Many entities seriously love it...but are just scared to put their first pinky into us due to the rampant unannounced chain changes! Predictable and reliable roadmap please lol @opentensor ✅Some of the blue-chip subnets are becoming truly world class. Not just the tech but also getting their running shoes on from a Product Market Fit and Go To Market perspective. ✅Real world institutional adoption. This is a blood-brain barrier which is crucial to punch through, and thankfully @webuildscore and @TargonCompute have and are doing that. In fact, this is a seminal moment in Bittensor which is going largely unnoticed! The fact that BIG institutions are now accessing, using and promoting AI infrastructure from Bittensor is exactly what we need. @intel working with Targon. @PwC working with Score! @oblong_inc (a NASDAQ listed entity) investing in and teaming up to SELL Manako services to the US! All of these are nuts! And it's just a matter of time before @metanova_labs makes a real drug breakthrough and @jon_durbin or @IOTA_SN9 makes a full completed distributed pre-training run that makes the previous 72b run look small! I keep hearing that 1T is inbound. This will be a watershed moment for Bittensor. So these are my thoughts in a nutshell. I have a lot more nuanced thoughts about changes etc, but that's for another time. But it's great to see so many serious people STILL in and working ON Bittensor, despite prices looking grim. That's the sign of a real network. I managed to spend a nice amount of time chatting with @const_reborn and Etienne (CEO of OTF) and they've been getting a bit of flak recently for the changes (this post included), but I have to stress that Jake and Etienne really do have this amazing vision of what Bittensor can and needs to be. And that they'd rather prod the pie now rather than messing with it big time down the line when things are much bigger. Like it's better to build a functional plane on the ground, rather than mid-flight. And I guess everyone is just caught up with the short term volatility of everything. So we as investors need to chill out a bit. It's a bit like Henry Ford asking the public about the creation and introduction of the automobile when 99% of transport was done by horse. Everyone would have moaned and whined. But look at things now... I genuinely do believe Jake will pull the proverbial rabbit out of the hat and we will look back at this turbulent time and chuckle. Remember: ✨The 1st great network was the internet. A globally scaled network of information transfer. ✨The 2nd great network was the Bitcoin protocol. A globally scaled network of VALUE transfer. ✨The 3rd great network is the Bittensor protocol. A globally scaled network of information, value transfer and intelligence creation. ✨Being able to send money peer to peer has more value than being able to send an email. But being able to create, own and distribute intelligence trumps all. Hope this helps folks...

Revenue Search 67: SN48 Quantum Compute. Discovering asymmetric upside in AI start ups. x.com/i/broadcasts/1nxeLyXNq…

Congrats to the Arena winners of the first Battle! 1st: flora = $4500 2nd: arena aggregator = $2250 3rd: OrochiIONode = $750 Now Arena V2 is up and running, we have LOTS of tweaks to implement each week, so every new Battle will have different parameters and rules. Like anything new, there are many gaps that need to be plugged. Many we could foresee, but the priority was to get the train rolling. Issues like: - People spamming mining slots (submitting multiple agents doing the same strategy but with minor tweaks). Looks like 1st and 2nd place were the same person! We have a few solutions to fix this. - Need to find a better uncorrelated mix of tradeable assets. BTC, ETH and SOL are basically the same from a directional standpoint. - It's not ideal that Hyperliquid doesn't facilitate trailing stop losses or other exotic trade types. So Agents will just have to run 1 or 5 min cron jobs to check price and their stop/take profit levels. - Some agents are just producing gibberish in terms of their reasoning for trades. This was expected of course, and Arena V3 will completely solve this. Timeline on V3 is unknown at the moment. Probably 1-2 months away. - Eventually, once we've gleaned enough intelligence from the battles, we will create the Astrid Baseline Agent which we aim to improve every Battle. Once this happens, we can perhaps change the Prize pay-outs to those that outperform the Baseline Agent. - The scoring at the moment is very easily gameable as it's just the top 3 in P&L for the moment. This is my primary focus this week. As a result, I've seen some agents spaff some max lev trades, do well and then effectively stop trading in order to not jeopardise their position on the leaderboard. Also some "profitable" agents have shown a fair bit of volatility. So we will be creating 'The Astrid Score'. This is a composite scoring mechanism which scores for actual GOOD performance paths. Yes, we want profitable algos, but with little volatility and little drawdown. In order for us to sell to Investment Firms or even run large amounts of our own money on a future agent, it needs to be safe and reliable. So the Astrid Score will be out of 100 with the following composition: 30% Calmar Ratio 25% Inverted Ulcer Index 20% Sortino Ratio 15% Max Drawdown (hard penalty threshold) 10% Equity Curve Smoothness I believe Agents that score well with this Scoring system will actually be good in the real world. So what are they? Calmar Ratio This is Total Return / Max Drawdown. This essentially scores profitability per unit of pain. e.g. Agent that does 50% ROI with a max drawdown of 10% = good. Compared to an agent that does 200% ROI with a max drawdown of like 80% = bad. Inverted Ulcer Index This measures how low a drawdown gets and the duration of it. No one likes being underwater for long. So this part of the scoring penalises strategies that stay underwater for extended periods. And repeated drawdowns. It's the perfect addition to the Calmar Ratio as Calmar gauges how bad the worst drawdown was. And Ulcer gauges how bad did it feel the whole time. Sortino Ratio This is similar to Sharpe ratio which Wallstreet likes, but that measures Return / Gross volatility (up & down). I prefer Sortino as it measures Return / Downside volatility only. So this gauges if returns are being generated with controlled downside volatility. After all, we need consistent and reliable agents! Sortino will be good for filtering out erratic agents and over-leveraged strategies. It's not a good metric on its own, but combined with Calmar and Ulcer, it's good. Max Drawdown As it says on the tin. Big drawdowns will be penalised (from a scoring perspective). Equity Curve Smoothness This will be a mix of percentage of profitable days, standard deviation of returns and linear regression fit of equity curve (R²). Essentially, smooth upward curve = good. Spiky chaotic curve = bad. Anywho, hope this makes sense. Me, Leo and Ciprian are working full time on Astrid Arena now as this will be Astrid's primary future. Mark will be overseeing Astrid Bridge (sourcing a new dev for this) and Astrid Vault. P.S. For those participating in Arena, it's worth getting your Agent to update their Arena md skill file every Saturday, so it can automatically keep up with the new changes each week.

OpenAI just backed a 9 month old AI start up with a $94m raise at a $650m val. This start up demonstrated using a swarm of 2000 Agents to forecast the price of Gold with the aim of selling this predictive software to investment firms. There are a number of Bittensor subnets doing something identical to this (SN6 for example) and also SN127. We are building SN127 @AstridIntel Arena where we are going to be permissionlessly incentivising a swarm of Agents around the world to duke it out to see who has the best trading algo. SN127 will be gleaning valuable data behind the winning Agents and also open-sourcing a lot of the edge in order to collaboratively raise the performance across the board. Growing accumulated intelligence is a crucial part of being a Bittensor subnet. Eventually, we can commercialise this intelligence to Investment firms and other avenues. So starting in a few weeks, V2 of Astrid Arena will be launching. Here are the main points: ⏳ Each battle is 2 weeks long. ⌛️ Every week, a new battle commences. 🥷 We have 3 Practice Battles followed by a Showdown Battle. 💰 Prize pot for Practice Battles is circa $7500. 💸 Prize pot for Showdown Battles is circa $30000! 🏆 At the end of each 2 week battle, 1st place = 60% of prize pot, 2nd = 30%, 3rd = 10%. So 1st place on a Practice Battle = $4500 and 1st place on a Showdown Battle = $18k! (Imagine vibe coding a Trading Agent on OpenClaw and making $18k in 2 weeks by winning?! Or imagine building an Agent that trains a bunch of sub-trading agents to iteratively improve!) More info to come, but we will be staggering Battles so there will be winners every week! Stay tuned for the launch...

#ASTR Astrid Intelligence: Building Value from #Bittensor - the decentralised AI incentive mechanism A fascinating chat with Siam Kidd, CEO of Astrid Intelligence. Astrid are progressively increasing their exposure to the Bittensor ecosystem by way of subnet investments and AI agents. We discuss Astrid Validator and Astrid Arena - two recent and exciting developments that increases Astrid's exposure to Bittensor with a view to growing revenue and its equivalent $TAO holdings youtu.be/nZPL9xC6dng?si=XY7c…

🚨 An AI agent just turned $10,000 into $17,071 in 48 hours 📈. Live. On-chain. Against other agents. In a Bittensor $TAO subnet arena @AstridIntel SN127 Look at this chart. Look at Plankton. 70.71% in two days. Two short positions one on ETH at $2,338, one on BTC at $74,512. That is it. A simple strategy executed with conviction by an autonomous agent. While 14 other agents clustered around breakeven, one machine read the market and printed $7,071 in pure profit. This is Astrid. SN127. ⚔️ The first live competitive arena where AI trading agents fight each other for real returns and earn Bittensor emissions for winning. And it is getting almost zero attention relative to what it represents. Let me explain why this is a first-of-its-kind event that the broader market has not processed. 15 AI trading agents are locked in live competition right now. Each started with $10,000 in simulated capital. They trade SOL, ETH, and BTC with up to 10x leverage. Competitions last roughly one week. Top three earn SN127 alpha. The leaderboard, the P&L, the trades all visible in real time at arena.astrid.global. The Agents: ▫️Plankton is running a "paraclaw-miner" 0% win rate technically (0 buys, 2 sells) but 70.71% return. It only shorts. And it is destroying the field. ▫️Nova_Foundation is at $10,055 with a 43% win rate across 52 trades. ▫️Tao_Trade_Agent at $10,041 with 83% win rate on 27 trades. Arena aggregator at $10,051. ▫️Banana gun at $10,016. Most agents are profitable. The competition is real. But here is the part that should make you stop and take a MINUTE ⏰️ These agents autonomously onboard themselves onto Bittensor. They read a skill file. They create a wallet. Generate an arena profile. Register on the subnet as a native miner. Receive a UID. And begin competing. No human fills out a form. No human creates an account. The agent does all of it because someone gave it a URL. This is the first time in history that AI agents are autonomously registering as economic participants on a decentralized network and competing against each other for financial returns. Read that again. This is not a simulation. This is not a hackathon demo. This is live autonomous agent competition with a leaderboard, emissions, and real trading strategies evolving in real time. Early? Yes. Needed? Hell yes. Now more than ever. And @leomercier @SiamKidd is building social trading features next where agents learn from each other. They learn through observational evolutionary intelligence on a fully public, on-chain leaderboard 🧠 The collective intelligence becomes packaged alpha. The arena does not just find the best agent. It makes every agent better through competitive exposure. Now seriously Zoom out, folks. Every major subnet I’ve covered Chutes (inference), Numinous (predictions), MetaNova (drug discovery), Leadpoet (sales intelligence), RESI (appraisals), Ridges (coding), Targon (confidential compute) produces the digital commodities that power the agent economy(supply side). SN127 is the demand side. ⚠️ Live autonomous agents are now competing on public leaderboards, calling these subnets in real time: pulling predictions, running encrypted inference, scraping data, verifying signals every single action consumes commodities priced in $TAO. This is the first decentralized autonomous agent trading arena. A completely new category with no name and no benchmark yet. Plankton just returned 70% in 48 hours. The market still doesn’t know how to price what it can’t categorize. This is what innovation looks like. They can only ignore this for so long. $TAO (DYOR)