# The opening slides: Bittensor Trend Data and the library row

For Jacob Steeves' keynote, Exploit Summit, Montreal, 28 September 2026. Built 23 September, five days out, on Jacob's ask to open the way Jensen Huang opens GTC (Washington, D.C., 28 Oct 2025): the trend chart, the "new computing model" claim, the row of libraries, then the pause. The two slides are live as slides 1 and 2 of the deck at https://bittensor-talk.pages.dev (branch `slides-site`; every other slide moved down by two). PNGs: `media/opening-trend-chart.png` and `media/opening-library-row.png` (3200×1800). Data: `content/data.json → trend` and `→ library` in the deck repository. Jensen's transcript and the note on his first five minutes: `docs/sources/talks/huang-gtc-opening-2025.md`.

Terms used below. **Log axis**: each step up the left-hand side is ten times the one below, so a line that rises at a steady angle is growing by the same multiple each year. **Netuid**: the number of a subnet on the chain (SN51 is netuid 51). **Archive node**: a copy of the chain that keeps every past block, so a value can be read as it was on any past day. **Block**: the chain adds one about every 12 seconds; a block number is a timestamp you can check. **dTAO**: dynamic TAO, live since 13 February 2025; holders stake TAO into a subnet's pool and the pool price sets that subnet's share of new TAO. **Alpha**: a subnet's own token, one per subnet.

## Slide 1. Bittensor Trend Data

Jensen's frame: transistor count keeps rising; single-thread performance, frequency and power flatten at a dashed line labelled "Dennard Scaling Stops"; the room reads the gap and he says "a new computing model". Ours keeps the shape: four series on one log axis, 2021 to 2026, one dashed line, series labels at the right, powers of ten at the left, no gridlines, black and white with one grey.

**The argument the chart makes.** The protocol's subsidy never grew and has now halved (grey, flat, then a step down). The number of markets grew a hundred and twenty-eight fold and is now capped (black, rising, then flat). At the dashed line the committee stopped choosing where new TAO goes and holders started: two million TAO moved into subnet pools within a year (grey), and the market's valuation of those subnets, counted in TAO, is about five and a half million (black, still rising). Annotation under the chart: "Five years. Half the minting. A hundred and twenty-eight markets." Every number is in TAO or a count; nothing is a dollar price.

**The inflection line.** "dTAO · 13 Feb 2025 / The committee stops." First dTAO block 4,920,351. Before it, 64 root validators voted the emission split (the dTAO whitepaper's own words for that: "the apathetic oligarchic voting system"); after it, nobody votes. Two of the four series begin at this line from nothing, which is what makes it the Dennard analogue. The other candidates were weaker: the subnet-count unlock is a consequence of dTAO (75 → 128 in five months while the on-chain limit still read 64); the first external-revenue subnet has no single date; the halving (15 Dec 2025) is visible as the step in the grey line and is said aloud, not drawn as a second dashed line (the deck rule is one annotation).

### The four series

| Series (label on screen) | Tone | What it is | Why it is there | Points | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Subnets | black | Number of subnets, root (netuid 0) excluded | The unit of parallelism: Bittensor's transistor count | 25 (2 unverified, 2021–22) | `TotalNetworks` and `NetworksAdded` read at each block on the archive node, 23 Sep 2026 |
| TAO minted per day | grey | The emission schedule: 7,200 a day (1 TAO a block) until 10.5M were issued, then 3,600 | The subsidy that started everything: flat for five years, then cut in half | 5 (1 unverified, 2021) | Protocol schedule; halving at block 7,103,976, 15 Dec 2025 (taostats; on-chain `TotalIssuance` 10,500,001); net issuance confirmed on-chain at about 7,050 a day in Apr–May 2023 |
| TAO staked into subnets | grey | Sum of `SubnetTAO` over netuids 1–128: TAO holders have swapped into subnet pools | Bottom-up choice made visible; starts at 45 TAO on the dashed line | 16, all verified | Archive node, 23 Sep 2026; four points cross-checked against `ecosystem-as-empowerment.md` §3.4 (identical) |
| Subnet tokens, value in TAO | black | Sum over subnets of pool price × (alpha in pool + alpha staked), the taostats market-cap definition, in TAO | The line that keeps rising: what the market says the 128 subnets are worth, in the network's own unit | 17, all verified | Archive node, 23 Sep 2026 (`SubnetTAO`, `SubnetAlphaIn`, `SubnetAlphaOut`); matches the ecosystem file at every shared block |

Method: JSON-RPC `state_queryStorageAt` against `https://archive.chain.opentensor.ai` at one block every 300,000 (about 42 days) from Finney block 1 (20 Mar 2023) to block 9,133,376 (23 Sep 2026), plus the dTAO and halving blocks. Storage keys are twox128(pallet) ++ twox128(item) ++ netuid. Each point in `data.json` carries its block number so anyone can re-read it.

### The numbers

Subnets (root excluded): 1 (3 Jan 2021, Kusanagi, unverified on-chain) · 1 (Jun 2022, Nakamoto, shape point) · 1 (20 Mar 2023, block 1) · 2 (1 May 2023) · 3 (12 Jun) · 4 (23 Jul) · 4 (3 Sep) · 10 (16 Oct) · 31 (26 Nov) · 32 (8 Jan 2024) · 32 (4 Apr) · 34 (20 May) · 39 (1 Jul) · 45 (13 Aug) · 49 (24 Sep) · 52 (5 Nov) · 62 (17 Dec) · 64 (28 Jan 2025) · 74 (10 Mar) · 94 (21 Apr) · 116 (3 Jun) · 128 (15 Jul 2025) · 128 through 23 Sep 2026.

TAO minted per day: 7,200 (2021, schedule) · 7,200 (20 Mar 2023) · 7,200 (15 Dec 2025, block 7,103,975) · 3,600 (15 Dec 2025, block 7,103,976) · 3,600 (23 Sep 2026).

TAO staked into subnets: 45 (13 Feb 2025) · 165,040 (10 Mar) · 522,877 (21 Apr) · 705,962 (3 Jun) · 874,624 (15 Jul) · 1,040,455 (25 Aug) · 1,287,544 (6 Oct) · 1,559,804 (17 Nov) · 1,757,997 (28 Dec) · 1,902,872 (8 Feb 2026) · 2,046,856 (22 Mar) · 2,017,763 (3 May) · 1,973,097 (13 Jun) · 2,005,281 (25 Jul) · 2,033,118 (5 Sep) · 1,967,851 (23 Sep 2026).

Subnet tokens, value in TAO: 64 (13 Feb 2025) · 399,674 (10 Mar) · 1,578,507 (21 Apr) · 1,888,427 (3 Jun) · 1,973,819 (15 Jul) · 2,139,111 (25 Aug) · 2,640,086 (6 Oct) · 3,180,322 (17 Nov) · 3,458,821 (15 Dec) · 3,649,892 (28 Dec) · 4,253,899 (8 Feb 2026) · 5,023,206 (22 Mar) · 4,964,193 (3 May) · 4,918,033 (13 Jun) · 5,237,088 (25 Jul) · 5,701,492 (5 Sep) · 5,456,350 (23 Sep 2026).

### Honest caveats, to say before a critic does

1. **The staked line is flat.** About 2.0M TAO since March 2026, down slightly this month. FalconX (May 2026): "adoption appears to be growing slower than expected." The chart shows it; do not talk over it. Line for the room: "The minting halved and the slots filled. What grew is what people put into them."
2. **The value line is a valuation.** It is in TAO, not dollars, so it is not the TAO price, but it is still a market price and it fell from 5.70M to 5.46M between 5 and 23 September. Re-pull on 27 September. If it has fallen further, keep it and say so; the shape of the year is the point, not the last dot.
3. **Subnets are capped by a constant.** 128 is `SubnetLimit` on-chain (V440 deferred raising it), not a demand ceiling. The flat top of that line is a protocol choice.
4. **The emission line is the schedule, not net issuance.** Registration fees are burned and recycled, so on-chain `TotalIssuance` grows about 7,000 a day in 2023 and about 2,600 a day in 2026, below the 7,200 and 3,600 drawn. The pre-May-2024 `TotalIssuance` storage also over-counted (corrected in a May 2024 runtime), which is why cumulative issuance is not on the chart.
5. **2021 and 2022 are shape points.** Finney's archive begins 20 Mar 2023 (block 1). Kusanagi (3 Jan 2021) and Nakamoto (Nov 2021) were one network on a 1-TAO-a-block schedule; those points are drawn hollow and marked `verified: false`. Finney block 1 read 4,181,330 TAO already issued, consistent with the schedule.
6. **Subnet count before October 2023.** Root (netuid 0) appears between 3 Sep and 16 Oct 2023 and is excluded thereafter; the pre-root counts are netuids 3, then 1 and 3, then 11 and 21. The 10 on 16 Oct 2023 is the Revolution roll-out in progress.
7. **Considered and left off.** Chutes requests a day (public API, daily since 30 Jan 2025) peaked at about 25M a day in Sep 2025 and is about 2M a day now after the team cut free-tier traffic; it would read as decline. External revenue has two or three checkable points (Lium $432K May 2026 → $964K Aug 2026; Chutes $1.13M per 90 days), all in dollars and all since 2026; too thin for a line. Cumulative transactions, registered hotkeys and GPUs on Lium have no checkable history from this VM (the taostats and tao.app APIs need keys).

## Slide 2. Incentive computing begins with subnets.

Jensen's frame: "Accelerated Computing Begins with CUDA-X Libraries", a row of tall cards, each a library with a one-line function, walked left to right in one breath each, closed with "just a representative of 350 different libraries". Ours: eight cards in Jacob's order, black frame on white, netuid in grey mono at the top, name, one grey line of function, one number in mono above a hairline. Heading: "Incentive computing begins with subnets." (Jacob's blank was "…begins with"; "subnets" or "markets" keeps the no-address argument; his dictation said "companies", which a company has an address to contradict.) Small line beneath: "No account. No ID. No permission." On a phone the row becomes two columns of four.

### The eight cards

All eight names and netuids were read from the chain (`SubnetIdentitiesV3`, block 9,133,404, 23 Sep 2026) and matched on taostats.io/subnets/<n> the same day. All eight are live and earning emission this week (rank by modelled gross emission share, 23 Sep 2026, from on-chain moving prices through the rank-32 gate).

| # | Card | Netuid | On-chain name | Function line | Number on the card | Source, date | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Lium | SN51 | `lium.io` | GPUs by the second. No account check. | $964K billed in a month | @lium_io, 9 Sep 2026 (x.com/lium_io/status/2097824624117473549); 1,187 renters, +36% MoM. Live today: 1,508 GPUs listed, 1,334 rented (lium.io/api/executors/stats, 23 Sep) | Verified; emission rank 1 |
| 2 | Targon | SN4 | `Targon` | Compute inside a sealed enclave. | 550 TAO bought back from revenue | @TargonCompute, 20 Aug 2026 (status/2090532960005246982): ">550 TAO" of alpha repurchased from one month of organic revenue | Verified; rank 3 |
| 3 | Hippius | SN75 | `Hippius` | Storage. Egress free. | 100 TB egress, billed $0 | @Hippius_cloud, 8 May 2026 (status/2052618760557674861) | Verified; rank 20 |
| 4 | NOVA | SN68 | `NOVA` | Molecules against protein targets. | 4.8M molecules screened | taoprotocol.org NOVA profile, 2026: "on the order of 4.8 million molecules against roughly 7,000 protein targets" | Name verified; number team-stated [VERIFY]; rank 16 |
| 5 | Chutes | SN64 | `Chutes` | Any open model, in attested hardware. | 2M requests a day | api.chutes.ai/invocations/stats/llm, 7-day average 16–22 Sep 2026: 1.96M requests and 27.1B tokens a day, public LLM endpoints; 6.66B requests lifetime | Verified (re-pulled 23 Sep); rank 2 |
| 6 | SayGM | SN28 | `SayGM` | Frontier models below list price. | 96B tokens routed | @say_gm_, 7 Sep 2026 (status/2096886191081615619): 96.48B tokens processed; listed GPT-6 Astra 4 Sep, a week before OpenRouter | Verified; rank 15 |
| 7 | RedTeam | SN61 | `RedTeam` | Paid to break bot detection. | Seven-figure revenue | taodaily.io, 11 Aug 2026, Innerworks (CEO Oliver Quie) on the Revenue Search podcast: "seven-figure annualized revenue", "90%+ gross margins" | Name verified; number team-stated [VERIFY]; rank ~30, at the emission gate |
| 8 | OpenRoboto | SN80 | `OpenRoboto` | Robot policies that beat the champion. | 50% → 85% on LIBERO-Pro in 21 days | taodaily.io, Aug 2026: miners pushed π0.5 "from 50% to 85% on LIBERO-Pro in just 21 days"; mainnet since Jul 2026 | Name verified; number team-stated [VERIFY]; rank 11 |

**The three names Jacob flagged.** Nova is on-chain as `NOVA` (capitals), Metanova Labs, São Paulo; Metanova speaks at 11:20 the same morning ("Darwinian Drug Discovery") and its CEO Micaela Bazo sits on the Day 2 closing panel, so the card hands a thread forward. RedTeam is on-chain as `RedTeam`, Innerworks, London; it has no official X account, which is why it looked unverified, but the chain, taostats and TAO Daily agree. OpenRoboto is on-chain as `OpenRoboto`; the slot was acquired in July 2026, so trackers show an older registration date for the previous owner. None of the eight is stalled; no substitute is needed.

**Substitutes, if a card must go.** Engy SN53 (`engy`; Kimi K3, 2.8T parameters, on 80 RTX 5090s; public weekly ledger; rank 8); KubeTEE SN90 (`KubeTEE`; Pierre Manseau, Montreal, in the room; rank 14); Teutonic SN3 (`Teutonic`; the 110B permissionless run, not finished; rank 9); Affine SN120 (`Affine`; rank 4; Jacob's own, held back for the reveal in section 5); Conjectures SN66 (`conjectures`; a 16-year-old case of Green's Problem 51 solved and Lean-verified, 9 Sep 2026; rank 85, almost no emission, so its story is the proof, not the market). Cacheon SN14 (`Cacheon`, latent-to) is confirmed on-chain, rank 31, for the [JACOB] item on slide 19.

**Caveats.** Five of the eight numbers are checkable (Lium, Targon, Hippius, Chutes, SayGM); three are team statements relayed by TAO Daily or TAO Protocol (NOVA, RedTeam, OpenRoboto) and are marked `verified: false` in `data.json`. Lium's billings are gross, providers take a share, and part of the demand is other subnets. SayGM's discounts are paid for by emissions and its net take is not published. RedTeam sits at the edge of the emission gate; if it drops below rank 32 before the 28th it still has revenue, which is the point of its card. Re-pull every card on 27 September.

## The Jensen structure, in five lines (the fifteen-line note is in the transcript file)

1. Claim cold in one sentence ("a new computing model for the first time in 60 years"), then make it expensive ("takes an enormous amount of time and set of conditions"); Jacob's dictated paragraph mirrors this line for line.
2. The trend chart at about 1:50, read as a prediction that came true, and the inflection named three times ("Dennard scaling has stopped") so it sticks.
3. Grant the cost before the benefit ("if you just did that, it actually runs slower... one domain at a time"); Jacob's honest-limits paragraph is this move and it earns the row.
4. The library row at about 3:40 with "This is the treasure of our company", then demote the obvious asset ("Most people talk about the GPU..."): for Jacob, the token is the GPU, the subnets are the libraries; one breath a card, no card gets two sentences.
5. The pause at about 5:30 is a video and ninety seconds of silence, then the human line and the turn to the world; for Jacob: no video, go to black, "Hello everyone. It's been one year."

## What changed in the deck

`content/data.json` gained `trend` and `library`. `scripts/generate-slides.mjs` gained the `trend()` and `library()` builders and slides 1 and 2; every other layout key is +2. `src/figures.ts` gained `trendFigure` (log axis, dashed inflection, right-edge labels that push apart when they would collide, hollow dots for unverified points). `src/render.ts` and `src/types.ts` gained the `trendlog` and `cards` kinds. `src/style.css` gained the card row and its two-column phone layout. `content/slides.md` has the two new slides with notes in Jacob's voice and every slide reference renumbered; the minute marks on slides 3 to 28 are the v4 marks and have not been shifted [JACOB: the opening adds about three minutes; what to cut, or whether the greeting moves in front]. README updated. Checked at 1600×900 and 390×844 (no overflow; the phone chart is small, as the other charts are). Deployed with `npm run deploy` (Cloudflare Pages project `bittensor-talk`; token and account ID read from 1Password vault Arbos, not printed); https://bittensor-talk.pages.dev returns 200 and serves the new bundle.

## On 27 September

1. Re-run the archive-node read for the four trend series at the head block and replace the last point of each (`data.json → trend.series[].points`); the query is `state_queryStorageAt` on `SubnetTAO`, `SubnetAlphaIn`, `SubnetAlphaOut`, `TotalNetworks` for netuids 1–128.
2. Re-check the eight cards against their sources; swap in a substitute from the list above if a subnet has stalled.
3. `npm run slides`, `npm run build`, open slides 1 and 2, `npm run deploy`.