As of today, General Tao Ventures has rebranded to General Tensor. Because we foresee #Bittensor and decentralized AI becoming an industry with incredible growth and scale, akin to the great technological revolutions of the past. We have started our journey of vertically integrating the entire DeAI stack through Bittensor, with validating, mining, subnet incubation and application building. And soon, we will continue to integrate and acquire other core inputs to those verticals. A lot to come in 2026!

TensorFi Workshop: "Unlocking DeFi for the Bittensor Economy" Co-hosted by @generaltensor and @wearetalisman, the session brought together key ecosystem leaders, including @mikecontango (Co-Founder & CEO, General Tensor), @contangojosh ( CSO, General Tensor) @bitmind (@kenjon), @forevermoney_ai (@philism), and representatives from @wearetalisman. The discussion focused on how decentralized finance infrastructure can accelerate the next phase of Bittensor's open intelligence economy. Key takeaways from the session: ▫️ DeFi primitives for subnet owners, including liquidity provisioning, investment vehicles, and market-making mechanisms ▫️Scaling the agentic economy through seamless capital flows and efficient execution rails ▫️ How Bittensor's decentralized AI stack can integrate with and strengthen existing DeFi protocols ▫️ Practical pathways for institutional capital and AI agents to participate in open intelligence markets The workshop showcased real infrastructure initiatives connecting Bittensor subnets with advanced financial systems, highlighting a key step toward greater subnet growth, liquidity, and ecosystem maturity. Video highlights from the session below. 🎥 @proofoftalk

As of today, there’s essentially 5 companies who have successfully completed meaningful SOTA moving decentralized *pretraining* runs: - @PrimeIntellect (10B INTELLECT-1, Oct 24) - @Pluralis (7.5B Node0, Oct 25; 8B Agora launch, May 26) - @NousResearch (40B Consilience, May 25) - @covenant_ai (Coventant-72B, Mar 26) - @MacrocosmosAI (Orion-100B, June 26) In October ‘24, I thought we would enter a decentralized AI training race. I think that’s gearing up now.

TensorFi: Unlocking DeFi for the Bittensor Economy. June 3 at the Louvre for @proofoftalk with @generaltensor @wearetalisman @forevermoney_ai @bitmind DeFi infrastructure for subnet owners — liquidity, investment primitives, market making, and the agentic economy. Plus how Bittensor's AI stack can evolve existing DeFi protocols. Panelists: @mikecontango @contangojosh @kenjon @philism & more! RSVP: luma.com/glytiyi4

Come join us to chat 0xMarkets updates!

@proofoftalk 2026 see you there! June 2-3rd, Louvre Palace, Paris. luma.com/glytiyi4

The greatest minds in TAO. One room. The Louvre. The Bittensor Track is back at @proofoftalk for year two, and we're co-hosting the #TensorFi workshop with @wearetalisman. @mikecontango, @contangojosh, @kenjon of @bitmind, @philism of @forevermoney_ai, and @wearetalisman will be discussing: 🔹 What can DeFi unlock for the Bittensor network — liquidity, investment primitives, market making, the agentic economy? 🔹 How can Bittensor's AI infrastructure improve and evolve existing DeFi protocols? June 3. Paris. Register here: luma.com/glytiyi4

Giza is now part of the Gauntlet affiliate program. @gauntlet_xyz will credit a reward to Giza based on the liquidity Giza agents supply to Gauntlet's curated vaults. The revenue share agreement is designed to be a win-win.

Bittensor $TAO live from the Louvre 👀 movie 🎥

We’re delighted to welcome back @GeneralTensor as a Platinum Sponsor of the Bittensor Track at Proof of Talk. Formerly General TAO Ventures, General Tensor was the first supporter of the Bittensor Track back in 2024. We were fortunate to be close to them from the start, and they became partners and co-creators of last year’s track. Their early conviction helped make this possible. Today, General Tensor is building the full-stack infrastructure layer for the Bittensor economy, operating across blockchain, AI, and data centers. From validation and subnet incubation to market access and capital formation, they are building products that move capital into subnets with minimal friction. For retail traders. For institutional allocators. For autonomous AI agents. Through @Rubicon_Bridge, their bridge built in partnership with Chainlink, General Tensor is opening new liquidity pathways for subnet tokens and connecting Bittensor to one of the fastest-growing onchain ecosystems. Backed by DCG, Lvna Capital and Good Morning Holdings, General Tensor is helping turn open intelligence into a real, capitalised economy. This summer, General Tensor returns to the Louvre. Platinum Sponsor of the Bittensor Track at Proof of Talk.

Zcash pumped and now Near, Venice, Railgun, et al. are in a race to build the mostly widely adopted privacy tools and protocols. For a moment really enjoy this return to cypherpunk roots, it’s nice to actually be rooting for everybody for once

1/ For a decade, Web3 and TradFi argued. In 2026, they're sitting at the same table. In 10 days, Jenny Johnson (CEO @FTDA_US, $1.5T AUM) and @adam3us (Co-Founder, @Blockstream , inventor of Hashcash) open Proof of Talk 2026 on the same stage. That fireside is the thesis of the entire event. @proofoftalk

We ❤️ @wearetalisman Pleasure to partner with them on this, and we are thrilled for whats to come!

INTERVIEW: Why $VVV at $17 is cheap, w/ @YanLiberman If the TAM for inference is ~$200B, what's the TAM for Private Inference? @TrustlessState chats with @YanLiberman about - Why @AskVenice is crypto AI’s clearest revenue story - How he values $VVV - How Venice serves agentic inference - Why AI agents need $DIEM [TIMESTAMPS] 0:00 Intro 1:40 Privacy Guarantees Explained 5:01 Who Needs Private Inference? 9:25 A Privacy Use Case 10:19 Venice’s Privacy Tiers 12:31 Growth Surges After New Plans 20:29 Inference Reseller Economics 23:39 Why Revenue Is Hard to Know 28:11 Token Value & Trust 32:07 @ErikVoorhees & Alignment 33:52 Venice’s Unique Product Edge 37:34 Adult Content Demand 41:18 Permissionless Agentic Inference 44:56 Bear Cases for Venice 49:12 How to Value VVV 51:46 Is VVV Undervalued? 56:10 Closing & Disclaimers

We recently scored 75.2% on EVMBench! Thanks to @OpenAI and @paradigm for putting the benchmark together to test agentic smart contract vulnerability detection. Check out our writeup: testmachine.ai/blog/azimuth-…

Venice by Voorhees is the clearest AI growth play A few broad strokes I want to point out 1/ Fundamentals wise Venice has 3 million users and Yan is estimating a 12 month forward ARR of ~$260M. This means VVV trades at 2.5x forward revenue (Circulating market cap). This is rare in Crypto especially at a time when stakeholders want real revenue. 2/ Thesis wise people desire private inference while accessing open source models without sending their data to China. This is hard to do (China APIs, or intermediaries that route anywhere). Venice is private and hosts some models on private data centers and some in an E2E TEE Fashion for extreme privacy. Yan covers all of the tiers. Venice solves the market for those who want private inference but can't setup hardware at home and dont want to send data to China. I've talked about this a lot that its very hard to find a subscription service, that is private, lets you access leading open source models with zero data retention. Enterprise wise @YanLiberman is right the enterprise no data retention plans are solid from AI Labs, but they are API based and get very expensive. With Venice you can get similar guarantees on a $68/mo subscription, if you graduate from a user to enterprise API plan for work privacy guarantees your bill goes up 10-20x (this happened to us!). Net I think more enterprises/businesses use venice than we are assuming to save money vs graduating to enteprise AI tiers for similar privacy guarantees. 3/ Founder wise Erik is the guy who took down SBF live on a podcast. He's the guy who got the entire conference going at Permissionless on AI. When Erik eventually goes up against trillion dollar centralized AI founders to share the vision of private/open source AI he will inspire folks and bring them into Venice. The best storyteller is king. 4/ Future wise I think the biggest jump is autonomous agents holding VVV/DIEM, accessing models, earning capital and buying more VVV/DIEM for more usage. Then Agents build out their entire AI economy. Disclosure I am Long $VVV. H/T @ErikVoorhees

We are thrilled to announce that @generaltensor has acquired @BackpropFinance and the Tensorplex Validator! Backprop Finance is one of Bittensor’s highest-volume trading platforms, facilitating billions in transaction volume since its inception a year ago. With a vertically integrated portfolio spanning from data centers to Bittensor subnets and validators, General Tensor is uniquely positioned to scale Backprop Finance and the Tensorplex Validator into the definitive global infrastructure for decentralised AI. We look forward to seeing these products thrive under General Tensor’s leadership.

We have acquired @BackpropFinance and we could not be more excited. Subnets -> mining -> validating -> bridge -> and now trading. At @generaltensor our goal is to touch everything that makes Bittensor possible. This acquisition helps us get one step closer to that goal. Congrats to everyone involved, and thank you to the @TensorplexLabs team for trusting us as good stewards of the amazing platform they have built. Now it's time to get to work, and continue to iterate on what we have before us.

Today people use @AskVenice for Hermes/Openclaw agents for privately accessing open source models without sending data to China The arb is clear. You don't want to setup everything at home but you also dont want to use an intermediary or direct China APIs (GLM, Qwen, Minimax) and send all your data to China. On most intermediaries you can't guarantee your data won't go to China which is important to me and other folks. So you use Venice to avoid a hardware setup (mac Minis, GPUs, etc) and also leverage Chinese Open source models without sending data to china. The model breaks if China goes closed source but we haven't seen that happen. Longer term I think people give autonomous agents DIEM or VVV to allow agents to access AI inference for their own reasons People can setup autonomous @NousResearch Hermes agents (here is DIEM go use AI for X reason) or graduate their personal Hermes agents into autonomous ones Sovereign AI Agents that can access inference on their own, make money, grow their DIEM/Venice token holdings to access more intelligence and repeat The key will be figuring out where the brains/rest of the agent lives on-chain. This is a question for the @solana_ai / @_rishinsharma and @base teams among others. Maybe for now they just live on VPS on Digital Ocean/peoples laptops but the wallet and personality move on-chain. Probably the easiest right now. It seems likely people want to flex their existing agents publicly. If you graduate them to the public realm (Access to X, Access to a crypto wallet for clout on activities, etc). This is outside the venice idea but I think its likely people will want their personal agents in the public realm. Anyone building this? There needs to be a portal where you give your agent access to X/social network of some kind.

Wow this is pretty epic. Congrats to this guy.