# The ecosystem as empowerment: what the Bittensor community has built, September 2026

Research brief for Jacob Steeves' keynote (Exploit Conference, Montreal, 28 September 2026).
Compiled 17 September 2026. Extends `docs/research/top-subnets-2026.md` (15 subnets profiled 12 Sep) and uses the verified wording in `docs/research/affine-neurips-factcheck.md`. Every number carries a source and a date. Market numbers move daily; re-check anything on a slide on the day.

The frame Jacob asked for (17 Sep): the face of the talk is the subnet teams, the people Bittensor let build decentralized products they might never otherwise have had the option to build. "We give you a chance, because we have shown we can actually beat the frontier; here are the ways." TAO holders vote on these projects with their stake and say, bottom up, what the world needs.

How to read this file:
- **On-chain** = read from the Bittensor chain itself (finney, block 9,087,756, 17 Sep 2026 13:40 UTC, via the `SubnetInfoRuntimeApi.get_all_dynamic_info` runtime call and storage queries; archive node for history). **Team-disclosed** = the team said it. **Third-party** = a tracker or analyst inferred it. **[unverified]** = one source, not confirmed.
- **CONFLICT** = sources disagree. Both versions are shown.
- Quotes inside quotation marks are verbatim, read from the X API or `api.fxtwitter.com`, or from the linked page.
- TAO price used: **$225.60** (CoinGecko, 17 Sep 2026 13:40 UTC). Say "about $225".

Terms, defined once:
- **Subnet / netuid (SN)**: one independent market on Bittensor, identified by a number. 128 slots exist today.
- **Alpha**: a subnet's own token, priced in TAO. **Market cap** here = taostats definition: alpha price × (alpha in the pool + alpha staked).
- **Emission**: newly minted TAO. About 3,555 TAO were issued in the 24 hours to block 9,087,756 (on-chain `TotalIssuance` difference), worth about $800K a day. **Emission share** in the map = a subnet's modelled share of that new TAO under the rule in force today (EMA price × (1 − miner burn), through the rank-32 gate), computed from on-chain `SubnetMovingPrice`, `MinerBurned` and `SubnetEmissionEnabled` at block 9,088,085 (17 Sep 2026). A second, directly measured series (TAO actually injected into each pool, 43 samples over 10–17 Sep) is used in Deliverable 3; the two differ for young subnets, and Deliverable 3 explains why.
- **Miner**: someone who does the work a subnet pays for. **Validator**: someone who scores miners. **Owner**: the key that registered the subnet and receives 18% of its emission.
- **Root (SN0)**: staking TAO without choosing a subnet. **dTAO** (dynamic TAO): the February 2025 upgrade that gave every subnet its own token and let holders direct emission by staking into it.
- **TEE**: trusted execution environment, a hardware-sealed part of a chip that hides data from the machine's operator.
- **Status codes**: **LIVE-PAYING** = product live with evidence of paying outside customers. **LIVE** = product or mechanism running, no evidence of paying outside customers. **STALLED** = no product, no activity in 60+ days, or a parked / unnamed slot.

---

## Executive summary (10 lines)

1. All 128 subnet slots are mapped (Deliverable 1). 23 are live with paying outside customers, 72 are live without evidence of paying customers, 33 are stalled or empty. Grouped by what they let a person do without permission: 11 compute, 12 inference, 19 training, 11 data and storage, 13 agents and tools, 14 knowledge and search, 17 finance and prediction, 9 media, 9 science, 13 other or empty.
2. The five layers Jacob named on 13 Sep (compute, inference, data, knowledge, free intelligence) each have a door open tonight with a checkable number: Lium 1,449 GPUs listed and 1,227 rented (17 Sep); Chutes 2.37M requests a day (7-day average to 16 Sep); Hippius 100 TB of egress billed at $0 (May); Teutonic-II, a 110B permissionless pre-training run (Aug); Affine paying five open slots about $50,000 a week each (Aug).
3. Compute, inference and training take 59% of new TAO emission this week (24.0%, 15.5%, 19.8%); science takes another 14.5%, almost all of it Minos (genomics), NOVA (drug discovery) and OpenRoboto (robot policies). Holders are funding infrastructure and research first, consumer apps second.
4. The best faces (Deliverable 2, 17 candidates, 12 recommended) are a Michigan backend engineer with no lab and no VC who says Bittensor "acts as a completely decentralized VC fund" (Chutes), a pseudonymous ex-miner whose GPU market billed $964K in a month (Lium), and a Montreal man who built one of Canada's first ISPs in 1992 and now runs a subnet alone at 60, speaking at Exploit the same afternoon (KubeTEE).
5. The brief's constraints are met: three pseudonymous teams (Fish, the Affine team in China, Dendrite), four teams outside the US and Europe (Tbilisi, China, Kampala/Nairobi, Hanoi) plus three Canadian ones, one solo builder (Pierre Manseau), two individual miners who never owned a subnet (Vincent Rapido, "@hodler0_").
6. Bottom-up governance is measurable (Deliverable 3): at dTAO launch (13 Feb 2025) 70.0% of all TAO sat on root and almost none in subnet pools; on 17 Sep 2026, 47.5% sits on root and 2.01M TAO (17.4% of supply, about $453M) has been moved by holders into specific subnets' pools, across 128 subnets instead of 64.
7. Emission is concentrated by design: the top 10 subnets take about 61% of new TAO (model, 17 Sep 2026; 54.7% of the TAO actually injected into pools over the week); 41 subnets get more than 0.1%; 59 get under 0.01%. Before dTAO (21 Jan 2025) the top 10 took 44% and none of 64 subnets got zero. Concentration is the vote, and it is also the critics' main point (see 3.5).
8. Honest critiques to say first: root stake still earns from every subnet without choosing; validator stake is concentrated (top 10 validators about 65% of root voting power, Apr 2026); the emission rule changed three times in 16 months; owners get 18% and can buy their own token; several subnets buy from other subnets with emissions; and one sudo key can change the rules.
9. Compared with a lab, the difference is who decides: a frontier lab's roadmap is set by a few executives and its largest customers; on Bittensor about 2M TAO of holder stake, movable at any block, decides which of 128 markets gets paid tomorrow. Neither is perfect; one is contestable by anyone with a wallet.
10. Deliverable 4 gives ten stage sentences in the shape "You can X. Y does that tonight. Z did last month", each with a dated source, and a one-slide layout of the five layers with one subnet and one number per layer.

---
## Deliverable 1. Ecosystem map: every subnet, grouped by what it lets a person do without permission

Method: subnet identities, pool sizes, prices and owner keys were read from the chain on 17 Sep 2026 (block 9,087,742–9,087,756). Emission share is the 7-day on-chain average defined above. Team, location, product, users, numbers, X handle and status were researched subnet by subnet from each team's website, GitHub, X account and the trackers (taostats.io, bittensor.ai, subnetradar.com, taopedia.org, subnetalpha.ai) plus tao.media, taodaily.io and taoprotocol.org. Follower counts were read via `api.fxtwitter.com` on 17 Sep 2026. Where the team's location could not be found, the table says "unknown"; nothing is guessed.

Two caveats before the table:
- **Emission share and market cap disagree on purpose.** Under the rule in force since June 2026 (see Deliverable 3), a subnet's share of new TAO follows the moving average of its alpha *price*, not its market cap, and then passes through a gate that starves everything below about rank 32. A young subnet with a small float and a high price (Minos SN107, $19M, 6.7%; KubeTEE SN90, $2.7M, 3.2%) can out-earn an older, bigger one (Vanta SN8, $33M, 3.5%). Use ranks, not percentages, on a slide.
- **"Active miners" is a tracker field.** taostats' `active_miners` (used for "miners" in the source CSV) can be far below the registered UIDs shown on other trackers. It is a floor, not a count of participants.

Counts (128 subnets, 17 Sep 2026): **23 live with paying users**, **72 live without evidence of paying users**, **33 stalled or empty**.

| Layer | Subnets | Live, paying | Live, no paying users | Stalled | Share of TAO emission (gross, modelled 17 Sep) | Alpha market cap ($M) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Compute | 11 | 3 | 7 | 1 | 24.0% | 219 |
| Inference | 12 | 3 | 7 | 2 | 15.5% | 211 |
| Training | 19 | 1 | 15 | 3 | 19.8% | 184 |
| Data and storage | 11 | 5 | 1 | 5 | 2.8% | 66 |
| Agents and tools | 13 | 1 | 8 | 4 | 7.5% | 61 |
| Knowledge and search | 14 | 3 | 9 | 2 | 2.2% | 66 |
| Finance and prediction | 17 | 4 | 10 | 3 | 4.2% | 86 |
| Media | 9 | 3 | 4 | 2 | 9.6% | 109 |
| Science | 9 | 0 | 9 | 0 | 14.5% | 89 |
| Other and unassigned slots | 13 | 0 | 2 | 11 | 0.0% | 10 |
| **All** | 128 | 23 | 72 | 33 | 100.0% | 1,100 |

### Compute: rent or sell GPUs, CPUs, bandwidth, quantum time

*What it lets a person do without permission: Point hardware at the network and get paid; or rent it with no account check.*

| SN | Name | Team, where based | Product (one sentence) | Who uses it | One hard number (source; date) | X | Status and evidence | Mcap $M | Em. share |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 51 | Lium | Datura AI Corp; founder "Fish" (@fish_datura), pseudonymous ex-miner; engineering team partly in Tbilisi, Georgia [see Deliverable 2 §4] — No disclosed HQ; Datura Labs engineers in Tbilisi, Georgia [unverified] | Rent an NVIDIA GPU (RTX 3090 to B300) by the second with no account verification, or list your own GPU and get paid. | 1,187 paying renters in a month; 63% of rentals started by software agents; AI startups, researchers, other subnets' miners | $964K billed to 1,187 renters in one month, +36% MoM; @lium_io https://x.com/lium_io/status/2097824624117473549; 9 Sep 2026. 1,449 GPUs listed, 1,227 rented (84.7%) on lium.io/api/executors/stats, 17 Sep 2026 | @lium_io (5.0k) | **LIVE-PAYING** — monthly billings disclosed; $1,000,000 revenue-funded burn on-chain (extrinsic 9032919-0005, 9 Sep 2026) | 96.0 | 11.89% |
| 4 | Targon | Manifold Labs (Rob Myers CEO, James Woodman); $10.5M Series A led by OSS Capital, Jul 2025 — Austin, Texas, USA | Rent a GPU or CPU VM, or buy inference, inside a hardware-sealed enclave (Intel TDX / NVIDIA confidential computing) so neither Manifold nor the machine owner can read your workload. | Dippy AI (~50% of its text inference, six-figure contract, Apr 2026); Ridges SN62, Score SN44; developers | >550 TAO (>$115K) of alpha repurchased from organic revenue in one month; @TargonCompute https://x.com/TargonCompute/status/2090532960005246982; 20 Aug 2026. SubConnect estimate $5.5–6M/yr (26 Aug 2026) | @TargonCompute (5.7k) | **LIVE-PAYING** — monthly revenue buybacks on a public wallet; revenue itself not published in 2026 | 73.0 | 7.16% |
| 25 | UR | UR Foundation (Brien Colwell, Jack Ai-Leung, Keith Singery) — San Francisco, CA, USA | Share home bandwidth as a residential VPN/proxy provider and earn; or buy the decentralised VPN. | Consumers (VPN app), businesses buying residential egress | "350k+ MAU" and "100k residential providers" — team-stated; https://ur.io / @urnetwork; 2026 [unverified exact post] | @urnetwork (4.1k followers) | **LIVE-PAYING** — paid VPN subscriptions; note 7d emission 0.0% and 1 active miner on-chain | 11.6 | 0.00% |
| 110 | Green Compute | team not named; no public repo — UK (first-wave biogas-farm miners; London event) [unverified] | Rent RTX 4090/5090 by the minute from $0.40/GPU-hr or call an OpenAI-compatible API, powered by attested green energy. | enterprise inference buyers (unnamed); site testimonials look fabricated (see notes) | "Generated over $82,000 in profitable revenue in the first month" and "$8,200 USD (37 TAO) buyback"; green-compute.com roadmap; Jun 2026 — team-claimed [unverified] | none found (taostats @vocence_bt is partner Vocence SN78 and no longer resolves) | **LIVE** — site with live pricing and CLI; revenue claim unverified; 1 active miner, 1.85% emission, price +24.5%/1m | 9.2 | 1.49% |
| 39 | deprecated (ex-Basilica) | formerly Basilica (Covenant AI) → Cathedral; Covenant exited Bittensor — unknown (Covenant was SF-based) | No product (slot deprecated). | no users yet | none found | none (@basilica_ai is unrelated) | **STALLED** — on-chain name "deprecated", 1 miner, 7d emission 0.0% | 7.8 | 0.00% |
| 12 | Compute Horde | Backend Developers Ltd / Reef Technologies (Kacper Paczos et al. [unverified names]) — Warsaw, Poland | Rent verified GPU compute for batch/organic jobs (Docker workloads) through the ComputeHorde facilitator. | Other subnets (validation workloads), developers | none found (team publishes job counts on dashboard but no fixed disclosed figure captured) | @ComputeHorde (891 followers) | **LIVE** — facilitator and Discord active, but 7d emission 0.0% and only 8 miners; no paying-customer evidence | 5.0 | 0.00% |
| 48 | Quantum Compute | qBitTensor Labs, founder Bob Wold (also CEO of Quantum Rings); front end Open Quantum (openquantum.com) — unknown (US [unverified]) | Submit an OpenQASM circuit via the Open Quantum API/SDK and run it on real IonQ, Rigetti, IQM or AQT QPUs, free to start and paid at ~50% of vendor rates. | Quantum researchers/developers via Open Quantum; no named customers | "most jobs on OpenQuantum are being executed via Subnet 48" (Bob Wold, Subnet Session podcast); https://share.snipd.com/episode/bd34a132-3402-495e-8c34-8e02d770f628; 6 May 2026 [team claim] | @qbittensorlabs (4,546); @QuantumSN48 (1,921) | **LIVE** — free tier live; paid half-price tier "arriving within days" per TAO Daily (2026), no disclosed paying customers | 4.7 | 0.05% |
| 105 | Beam | Beam Network; founder Nic Savy (TAO Daily "Hash Rate" ep. 163); Yuma Accelerator cohort (Mar 2026) — USA (GitHub org location) [unverified] | Move data between S3/R2/GCS/HTTP through a network of paid bandwidth operators; anyone can run a worker and earn on verified throughput (Proof-of-Bandwidth). | AI pipelines/agents; no named paying customers | 238 active miners; taostats on-chain fields; 17 Sep 2026 | @b1m_ai (1,445) | **LIVE** — BeamCore API and dashboard live (data.b1m.ai), 0.59% emission; no paying customers evidenced | 3.6 | 0.18% |
| 128 | ByteLeap | unnamed (GitHub user byteleapai) — based: unknown | Rent bare-metal or VM GPUs (RTX 3090 → B200) aggregated from independent providers. | developers/enterprises; none named | "5000+ Active GPU Servers"; byteleap.ai; 17 Sep 2026 — team-claimed [unverified; only 11 active miners on-chain] | @byteleap_ai (292) | **LIVE** — site and docs live, repo pushed 11 Aug 2026, 0.05% emission; no paying evidence | 2.8 | 0.01% |
| 90 | KubeTEE | KubeTEE AI LTD (Cyprus HE 484181, reg. 24 Nov 2025) + 1-HORIZON LTD (miner operator); solo founder Pierre-André Manseau ("Pierre", GitHub pamanseau) — Limassol, Cyprus (registry); founder is Canadian-origin, 1-HORIZON staff in Vietnam/Cyprus (LinkedIn) | Run inference, agent or batch jobs inside hardware-attested TEEs (Intel TDX, Kata/CoCo) on decentralized Kubernetes clusters and pay in Alpha/TAO/USDC; confidential GLM-5.x inference is sold through sayGM. | sayGM (SN28) inference buyers; enterprises targeted; 3 active miners | GPU price card H100 $4 / H200 $5.50 / B200 $8 / B300 $10 per GPU-hr; github.com/KubeTEE-AI/kubetee-subnet README; Sep 2026. Also "$198k (≈1,003 TAO)" registration cost (same README) | @KubeTEEAI (140) | **LIVE** — validator live on Finney with public dashboard, models listed on saygm.com (kubetee.ai, 17 Sep 2026); "real external revenue… recycled on-chain every day" is team-claimed with no amount disclosed [unverified] | 2.7 | 3.18% |
| 106 | Nodexo | Neural Internet / VoidAI; Hansel Melo "Zoro" (CEO), Don Milligan (CTO) (taoprotocol.org) — unknown (X location "106") | Rent GPUs whose hardware is continuously proven (ZkGEMM proof-of-hardware); any validator can open its own storefront to sell network capacity. | GPU renters; none named | none found (15 active miners on-chain) | @nodexo (7,456) | **LIVE** — miner/validator/CLI public, repo pushed 23 Jul 2026, 0.03% emission; no paying evidence | 2.2 | 0.01% |

### Inference: run open (and frontier) models

*What it lets a person do without permission: Call a model through an API that no lab controls, or serve one from your own cards.*

| SN | Name | Team, where based | Product (one sentence) | Who uses it | One hard number (source; date) | X | Status and evidence | Mcap $M | Em. share |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 64 | Chutes | Rayon Labs / Chutes Global Corp (Nevis); founder Jon Durbin; new CEO Christian Hyland announced 7 Sep 2026 — USA (Durbin); entity Nevis | Call any open model, or deploy your own containerized model, behind an API running on anonymous miner GPUs inside TEEs, pay per use. | Developers and AI apps; other subnets (Ridgeline, Compelle validators run debates on Chutes) | 2.37M requests and 29.3B tokens a day (7-day average to 16 Sep 2026; api.chutes.ai/invocations/stats/llm, fetched 17 Sep 2026); 6.65B requests and 45.4T tokens lifetime; revenue $1.13M in the 90 days to 30 Aug 2026 (team dashboard via SubnetRadar) | @chutes_ai (11,597) | **LIVE-PAYING** — disclosed 90-day revenue; team says revenue covers "thirty to forty percent of operating expenses" (SubConnect, Aug 2026) | 94.4 | 9.12% |
| 53 | Engy | Hanlin AI; co-founder Ning Ren (@totheagi; ex-Google Brain TPU/XLA, ex-Pony.ai; Fudan CS); also owns SN11 TrajectoryRL — San Francisco, USA (X bio; LinkedIn) | Pay per token for frontier open models (e.g. Kimi K3, 2.8T params) served on consumer RTX 5090s, with a Merkle-root proof that the exact model you paid for actually ran. | Developers, labs, startups via API ("Any lab, startup, or university can now own it"); no named customers | Epoch 13 (9–16 Sep 2026): 77 miners, 3,806,357 requests, 66.5B tokens, $12,726 settled to miners (provider.engy.ai/api/subnet/v1/epoch/latest, public signed ledger, fetched 17 Sep 2026). Kimi K3 (2.8T params) on 80× RTX 5090 (@totheagi https://x.com/totheagi/status/2081855316443205717, 27 Jul 2026) | @engyai (2,379); founder @totheagi (4,282) | **LIVE** — paid API and weekly USD miner settlements live since 21 Jul 2026; customer revenue not disclosed | 34.5 | 3.57% |
| 28 | gm (SayGM) | Taostats team (Marcus Graichen); GitHub `taostat` — London, UK | Buy Claude, GPT, Gemini or open models below list price through a sealed enclave (Intel TDX): your prompt is hidden from the router, and miners bid discounts with their own API keys. | Developers and privacy-sensitive users buying credits; KubeTEE SN90 and Engy SN53 resell models through it | 96.48B tokens processed cumulatively, >30B output; @say_gm_ https://x.com/say_gm_/status/2096886191081615619; 7 Sep 2026. Latest 72-minute epoch: $607.46 of traffic served (saygm.com/miners, 17 Sep 2026). SubConnect estimate $2.5–3M/yr GMV (26 Aug 2026) | @say_gm_ (1.0k) | **LIVE-PAYING** — users buy credits; gm's net take not published; discounts subsidised by emissions | 23.9 | 2.09% |
| 95 | Actual | Actual Computer Inc.; founder/owner Tom Lynch (@Tom_A_Lynch); advisor Steve Sperandeo (subnetradar) — New York, USA (X bios); subnetradar says Venice, CA; LinkedIn shows Los Angeles — conflicting | Install a one-line client on your Mac/Linux/Windows PC to run open models privately, link machines over an encrypted relay, and optionally pool idle compute for compensation. | individuals (public installer + docs); 1 active miner | none found (no user/TVL figures disclosed); 0.0% emission on-chain | @actualinc (4,922); founder @Tom_A_Lynch (5,747) | **LIVE** — public installer, register flow and llms.txt docs live at actual.inc (17 Sep 2026); but subnet has ~0% emission and 1 active miner; no paying customers evidenced | 22.6 | 0.00% |
| 14 | Cacheon | latent-to (Shivanshu Purohit, Cameron Fairchild) — based: unknown | Run inference through a caching layer that serves repeated prompts cheaper; miners compete on cache hit-rate/latency. | Developers via API; other subnets [unverified] | none found | @cacheon_ai (664 followers) | **LIVE** — 0.8% emission, 14 miners, repo active; no revenue disclosed | 9.7 | 0.65% |
| 10 | Pareton | Pareton (Xavier Lyu) — New York, NY, USA [unverified — founder LinkedIn] | Intended: pay-per-request inference on frontier/open models; currently "Coming Soon" landing page. | no users yet | none found | @Pareton_ai (419 followers) | **STALLED** — website still "Coming Soon", 2 miners, 7d emission 0.0%, no product | 8.5 | 0.00% |
| 46 | Instant | Resi Labs / Instant team, CEO Seby Rubino ("sebyverse", ex-Microsoft Purview); same team as RESI and Zipcode; investors DSV Fund, Astrid Intelligence PLC — unknown (US [unverified]) | Call an OpenAI-compatible streaming API for fast private LLM inference where Instant's own code tunnels into miner hardware (Managed VNet IR) instead of TEEs. | Ditto AI (DittoBench) signed as first customer, Aug 2026; waitlist open | Owner key placed in a 120,000-alpha perpetual Conviction lock; https://www.tao.media/zipcode-shifts-subnet-46-to-instant-as-bittensor-rule-changes-raise-pressure-on-builders/; Aug 2026. No revenue figure | @instantsubnet (431) | **LIVE** — first customer agreement announced but financial terms undisclosed; 7d emission 0.0%, 1 active miner | 4.3 | 0.00% |
| 104 | TAOstatus | unknown — based: unknown | Miners supply spare LLM API capacity that TAO Status's "Bittensor Arena" agent pipeline consumes; the public site catalogues subnets by category. | TAO Status's own agent pipeline ("BT Arena Protocol") | none found | @taostatus_ai (39) | **LIVE** — validator went live 8 Sep 2026 with "real-world traffic" (team Discord via subnetradar.com/subnet-news/104/2026-09-08); 0.0% emission, 1 active miner, 2 validators | 4.2 | 0.00% |
| 2 | DSperse | Inference Labs (Ron Chan CEO, Colin Gagich) — Hamilton, Ontario, Canada | Get a zero-knowledge proof that a given ML model actually produced a given output (verifiable inference) via the Omron/DSperse API. | Other subnets and DeFi/AI apps needing verifiable inference; Inference Labs' own Proof-of-Inference clients | "160M+ zk proofs generated" on the subnet; https://inferencelabs.com / @inference_labs posts; 2026 [unverified exact date] | @inference_labs (37.9k followers) | **LIVE-PAYING** — Inference Labs sells verified-inference to enterprise/DeFi clients and has raised outside funding; note 7d emission ≈0% (validator weight low) | 3.5 | 0.00% |
| 29 | hoτfloaτ | coldint (pseudonymous) — unknown (Netherlands-linked [unverified]) | Intended: fast fp8/quantised inference for open models. | no users yet | none found | none verified (@ColdinT appears unrelated [unverified]) | **STALLED** — 1 miner, 7d emission 0.0%, no commits or posts in 60+ days | 3.3 | 0.00% |
| 96 | Verathos | team not publicly named (GitHub user verathos-ai, 1 contributor) — based: unknown | Call an OpenAI-compatible endpoint whose every inference carries a cryptographic sumcheck proof of correct execution; pay in TAO/USDC or lock alpha for daily inference credits. | individual devs; alpha lockers; no named customers | 81 active miners; taostats on-chain fields; 17 Sep 2026 | @verathos_ai (519) | **LIVE** — user accounts and alpha-lock credits live (KOL post via subnetradar.com/subnet/96, Sep 2026), repo pushed 8 Sep 2026, 0.38% emission; no external paying evidence | 1.5 | 0.06% |
| 92 | MicroTensor | "Microtensor team", unnamed (GitHub org microtensor-io) — USA (GitHub org location) [unverified] | Build a compressed specialist model plus router that matches frontier answers on certified hardware; buyers get signed certificates and an OpenAI-compatible endpoint ("from $0.08/1M tokens", pricing page). | no users yet; first certified model added to Verathos SN96 testnet | none found (8 active miners on-chain) | @MicroTensor (14) | **LIVE** — mechanism running, repo pushed 17 Sep 2026; 0.03% emission, no customers | 0.4 | 0.01% |

### Training: pre-training, post-training, RL, model competitions

*What it lets a person do without permission: Improve or train a model and get paid the moment you beat the incumbent; download the weights.*

| SN | Name | Team, where based | Product (one sentence) | Who uses it | One hard number (source; date) | X | Status and evidence | Mcap $M | Em. share |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 120 | Affine | Affine Foundation; founded by Jacob Steeves (Jul 2025); core ownership handed Jun 2026 to a China-based team ("Tobias, Allan, bignickeye"); Jacob is chief scientist — China (team); distributed | Post-train an open model (Qwen3.6-35B-A3B), duel the reigning king on coding, terminal, tool-use and math tasks, and take one of five paid slots if you win; winning weights are published. | No customers; open-weights users; buys compute on Lium and inference on Chutes | "each slot pays roughly $50,000 USD per week" (5 slots); @affine_io https://x.com/affine_io/status/2091498650119901215; 23 Aug 2026. Champions crowned 5 days in a row after the 18 Jun 2026 base switch (@affine_io, 24 Jun 2026) | @affine_io (2.5k) | **LIVE** — 5.6% of emission (7d); no customers; evaluator gamed twice and throne reset 27 Aug 2026 | 45.6 | 6.42% |
| 3 | Teutonic | Jacob Steeves + Dendrite (pseudonymous studio); code under GitHub `unarbos` — Distributed; paper authors Poland-linked (Warchoł, Korzeniewski, Bombała) | Submit a full model checkpoint into a permissionless LLM pre-training race; if your checkpoint lowers the loss, you are crowned king and paid; the weights are published. | Miners and open-weights downloaders; no customers | Teutonic-II: 110B-parameter permissionless run, "50% larger than any prior decentralized run"; @const_reborn https://x.com/const_reborn/status/2091896286035235027; 24 Aug 2026. Teutonic-I: 2,163 duels, 203 coronations, 73 coldkeys in 70 days (teutonic.ai/paper.html, Aug 2026) | none official (announced from @const_reborn); @DendriteHQ co-builder | **LIVE** — 2.61% of emission (7d); no revenue; Teutonic-I audit dispute (Templar, 20 Aug 2026) | 38.0 | 3.94% |
| 9 | IOTA | Macrocosmos Ltd (Will Squires CEO, Steffen Cruz CTO); ~20–30 staff — London, UK | Point a GPU (data-centre or gaming) at a pre-training swarm and get paid per verified layer of work; or pay TAO to launch your own distributed run up to ~100B parameters. | Miners; "Train at Home" participants in 16 countries; no paying training customers yet (team, May 2026) | 128-node permissionless training run launched "in 5 minutes, for 5 TAO"; @const_reborn https://x.com/const_reborn/status/2062258366739550618; 3 Jun 2026. Orion-100B at ~65% of colocated efficiency (Macrocosmos, 1 Jun 2026); Train at Home 23K+ downloads (20 Apr 2026) | @IOTA_SN9 (2.7k); @MacrocosmosAI (7.6k) | **LIVE** — training runs active, 2.29% of emission (7d); no paying customers | 30.4 | 2.45% |
| 56 | Gradients | Rayon Labs (founder Jon Durbin; sister subnet of Chutes SN64 and SN19) — USA (Durbin) [entity location unverified] | Upload a dataset, pick a base model and have competing miners fine-tune it for roughly $100 (small) to $500 (70B), then pull the model from Hugging Face. | "over 3,000 paying users, primarily hobbyists and smaller organizations" (SimplyTao); Rayon's own stack (train on SN56, serve on SN64) | "over 3,000 paying users"; https://simplytao.ai/blog/your-simple-guide-to-gradients-sn56; 2026 [third-party relaying team figure]. Paper: beat TogetherAI/Databricks/Vertex AI in 100% of 180 tasks; https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.07940; Jun 2025 | @gradients_ai (2,408) | **LIVE-PAYING** — public pricing, paying users, fiat revenue used to buy and lock alpha (team statement) | 18.8 | 1.81% |
| 5 | Hone | Manifold Labs spin-out / Latent (team not individually named; previously "OpenKaito"/"Hone" under Manifold) — based: unknown | Compete in weekly coding-agent/SWE challenges (train models to solve real repo tasks) and earn TAO; consume the resulting open coding models. | Miners; no external customers found | none found | none found (no verified official X; CSV blank) | **LIVE** — 244 active miners, 1.16% emission, active challenge rounds on GitHub; no product for external users | 12.6 | 1.30% |
| 97 | Albedo | Dendrite (@DendriteHQ, pseudonymous studio); GitHub `unarbos/albedo`; mechanism originally launched by "Arbos", an AI agent persona created by Jacob — Not disclosed (Dendrite probably Europe) | Fine-tune Qwen3.6-35B on coding trajectories, challenge the reigning king in 100–128-task coding duels judged by frontier LLMs, and take the emissions if you win; the winner's weights are published and served free. | Open-model users; no customers | 12M-trajectory dataset (122,000 PRs, 3,000 repos); tao.media 13 Jul 2026. Moved 100% of DeepSeek and 40% of GLM judge traffic from OpenRouter to Engy (@DendriteHQ, 11 Aug 2026). 5.12% of emission (7d) | @DendriteHQ (620); dev @weather_boss_; origin @arbos_born | **LIVE** — 5.12% of emission (7d); no revenue; eval machine compromised Jul 2026 and fixed in public | 7.6 | 2.51% |
| 81 | Reliquary | Reliquary core team ("Reliquary Contributors"; GitHub romain13190, 0xgrizz, Maziikoo); ownership transferred to core team Aug–Sep 2026 — based: unknown | Submit cryptographically verified GRPO rollouts that train a live Qwen3.5-2B checkpoint published to Hugging Face, or pull the checkpoints. | no users yet (RL-as-a-service planned) | Window 29,522: "142 submitted bundles, 32 selected, 22.5%"; https://www.reliqua.ai/; Sep 2026 | @reliquary_ai (238) | **LIVE** — 508 commits/30d, 41 miners, 7d emission 0.45% | 6.4 | 0.02% |
| 24 | Quasar | SILX AI (Eyad Gomaa, Youssef Farahat) — London, UK | Compete to train/fine-tune small "Quasar" models; download released open models. | Miners; open-model downloaders | none found | @QuasarModels (2.7k followers); company @silxai suspended | **LIVE** — models released, but 1 miner and 7d emission 0.0%; borderline STALLED | 6.0 | 0.00% |
| 38 | ChronoLLM | CrunchDAO (Jean Herelle) — Paris, France | Compete to train time-series foundation models on CrunchDAO's benchmarks; use resulting models. | Quant/forecasting researchers; CrunchDAO clients | none found | @chronollm (350 followers) | **LIVE** — 1.83% emission, 10 miners, active competitions | 4.1 | 0.81% |
| 65 | True Performance Network | Taofu Labs (Palokaj brothers per LinkedIn [unverified]); GitHub taofu-labs — based: unknown | Submit quantized GGUF language models under a time-locked commit to recurring benchmark competitions and earn for performance and efficiency ("compiler and optimization engine for AI"). | no users yet (miners only) | none found | @TPN_Labs (1,594) | **LIVE** — repo pushed 17 Sep 2026, 6 miners / 15 validators, but 7d emission 0.0% and price −36% in 1 month | 2.6 | 0.00% |
| 91 | cascade | TensorLink AI (GitHub org TensorLink-AI; X @tensorlink_dev); founders not named — Australia (GitHub org location) [unverified] | Compete to generate synthetic time-series data that trains state-of-the-art open time-series foundation models. | researchers; no external customers | 786 commits in 30d; subnetradar.com/subnet/91; 17 Sep 2026 (5 active miners on-chain) | @cascade_sn91 (281); @tensorlink_dev (224) | **LIVE** — repo pushed 17 Sep 2026, 1.64% emission; no customers | 2.2 | 0.34% |
| 102 | ConnitoAI | Connito AI; whitepaper authors Isabella Liu (GitHub isabella618033, 435 commits) and George Kim — based: unknown | Train a domain expert module for a shared Mixture-of-Experts model and get paid when it lowers held-out loss (Proof-of-Loss); experts published to Hugging Face. | no external customers yet (roadmap: customer training platform) | 15,781 training cycles in live submission log; connito.ai; 17 Sep 2026 (7 active miners) | @ConnitoAI (704) | **LIVE** — live submission log, repo pushed 16 Sep 2026, 0.48% emission; no customers | 2.1 | 0.11% |
| 125 | Refinery | Barbarian (GitHub Barbariandev) — in Aug 2025 he said SN125 was "owned across myself and another individual and a third party", with his godfather (astrophysics background) working on it [unverified for the 2026 Refinery relaunch] — based: unknown | Submit a Python optimizer; if it beats AdamW/Muon on a fixed 360M-parameter run within a 20-hour budget and is confirmed in a second run, you earn. | open-source LLM researchers; no customers | 20 h equal evaluation budget, 360M-param run; refinery125.com and tao.media (14 Sep 2026) | none (no official account; @refinery125 not found) | **LIVE** — launched Sep 2026, repo pushed 17 Sep 2026; 1 active miner, 0.03% emission | 2.1 | 0.02% |
| 117 | glyph | Glyph Research; CEO Taras Emelyanenko (since Jun 2026); lead dev "meowjet" — Dubai, UAE (X + LinkedIn) | Submit a lossless text codec; the best compression ratio holds king-of-the-hill emissions (a perpetual Hutter Prize). | researchers; no customers | none found (1 active miner) | @glyphresearch (168) | **STALLED** — 1 active miner, 0.05% emission, no commits since 30 Jul 2026 | 1.7 | 0.00% |
| 94 | pending... (BitSota) | Alveus Labs (GitHub AlveusLabs; Ali Hussein listed as Head of AI on LinkedIn; devs "mekaneeky", "karamazov19") — based: unknown | Evolve machine-learning algorithms with genetic programming on a fixed CIFAR-10 benchmark and get paid only when you beat state of the art. | no users yet | none found | @bitsota — suspended | **STALLED** — on-chain name "pending...", website field "pending...", X suspended, 0.0% emission, 1 active miner, last push 9 Jul 2026 | 1.4 | 0.00% |
| 108 | Prometheon | BitSpace Organization (same team as BitFan.ai / "TalkHead") — based: unknown | Build a content-moderation model and get scored daily against test content written by your BitFan fan group (≥500 qualified users required). | BitFan platform | 7,020 registered users, 3,294 active members; bitfan.ai; 17 Sep 2026 | none verified (@bitfanai 1 follower; @Prometheon_AI is unrelated) | **STALLED** — mining start "pending official announcement" (18 Aug 2026, subnetradar subnet-news), 0.0% emission, 1 active miner | 0.9 | 0.00% |
| 40 | Ralph | Ralph Labs (pseudonymous) — based: unknown | Compress open LLMs (quantise/prune) in an open competition and earn; download compressed models. | Miners; model downloaders | none found | @RalphLabsAI (98 followers) | **LIVE** — registered Jun 2026, active ralph-v2 repo, 0.12% emission; 1 miner | 0.7 | 0.02% |
| 47 | Feval | pseudonymous ("center196" GitHub; HF org feval-center; getreboot.org linked) — based: unknown | Submit a LoRA adapter on Qwen3.5-4B-Base and have it evaluated and ranked on a public leaderboard through decentralized verification. | no users yet (miners only) | none found (12-hour evaluation windows on 100,000-row datasets per team Discord, 5 Sep 2026 via SubnetRadar) | none found | **LIVE** — live dashboard and commits reported 5 Sep 2026 (https://subnetradar.com/subnet-news/47/2026-09-05), but 7d emission 0.01%, 1 miner, SubnetRadar health "Critical" | 0.7 | 0.00% |
| 103 | Capcomp | Capcomp-AI (GitHub org), unnamed — based: unknown | Submit recipes for merging LoRA adapters from a certified 30-adapter pool on Qwen3-8B to improve workflow benchmarks. | no users yet | 30 certified adapters in pool; huggingface.co/capcomp/sn103-adapter-pool; Sep 2026 | @CapCompAI (168) | **LIVE** — live mining results reported 29 Aug 2026, scoring overhaul underway (subnetradar subnet-news); 1 active miner, 0.03% emission, price −81%/1m | 0.2 | 0.00% |

### Data and storage: datasets, labelling, storage, RPC

*What it lets a person do without permission: Store files, buy or sell data, or serve chain data, without a cloud contract.*

| SN | Name | Team, where based | Product (one sentence) | Who uses it | One hard number (source; date) | X | Status and evidence | Mcap $M | Em. share |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 75 | Hippius | The Nerve Lab (co-founded by Marcus "Mog" Graichen of Taostats; CEO Jonathan Sheely, CTO Chris Hobel; ~11 staff) — UK [effective base per neuralteq; HQ unverified] | Buy S3-compatible encrypted storage, VMs or Drive plans with fiat or TAO (calculator shows ~$6/month per TB) and see every payment on Hippius's own chain. | Developers/businesses; other subnets — Ditto AI: "Storage runs on Hippius… We pay for both, in prod" (quoted on https://subnetradar.com/subnet/75) | 100 TB of egress served in a month, "AWS S3 would've billed ~$8,000... Hippius billed $0"; @Hippius_cloud https://x.com/Hippius_cloud/status/2052618760557674861; 8 May 2026. SubConnect estimate $200K/yr (26 Aug 2026) | @Hippius_cloud (3,726) | **LIVE-PAYING** — named paying customer (Ditto AI) in production; revenue not disclosed | 17.9 | 1.90% |
| 19 | blockmachine | Taostats team (Mark Davison, Jeff Horner, Ben Mason, Francisco Silva, Mahdi L'kotbi) — London, UK | Call Bittensor RPC/archive nodes served by decentralised miners (blockchain RPC as a service). | Taostats, wallets, dApps, other subnets | "~15B requests/month" served, infra cost "~$2.5k/month" — team disclosure; taostats/blockmachine posts; 2026 [unverified exact URL] | @blockmachine_io (1.0k followers) | **LIVE-PAYING** — RPC used in production by Taostats and external apps; 0.87% emission, 31 miners | 11.1 | 0.75% |
| 13 | Data Universe | Macrocosmos (Will Squires) — London, UK | Order custom scraped social-media datasets (X, Reddit, YouTube) via "Gravity" and download them; miners get paid to scrape. | Data buyers (marketing/AI teams), other subnets, Macrocosmos products | none found beyond dataset counts on Gravity (not captured) | @MacrocosmosAI (7.6k followers) | **LIVE-PAYING** — Gravity sells datasets to external customers (team-stated); 245 miners; 7d emission only 0.01% | 6.8 | 0.00% |
| 52 | Dojo | Tensorplex Labs (co-founder CK Cheung; Darwin Liew); backed by YZi Labs (ex-Binance Labs), ~$3M seed — Singapore | Earn TAO by producing or judging task completions in Dojo V2's competitive generator/discriminator game (human-preference data for RLHF). | no users yet — operations suspended | none found | none for subnet; @TensorplexLabs (19,762, company) | **STALLED** — team suspended operations late Dec 2025 citing post-halving economics; repo last push 3 Nov 2025; 7d emission 0.0% (SubnetRadar "earning ~0% emission") | 6.7 | 0.00% |
| 54 | Yanez | Yanez Compliance; top contributors Asem Othman and Omar A. Abaza — based: unknown | Generate adversarial synthetic identities (name/DOB/address variants, reworked face photos) to stress-test KYC, sanctions-screening and fraud detectors without touching real customer data. | Banks/compliance teams (target); no named customers | none found | @yanez__ai (1,960) | **LIVE** — 68 commits/30d, 137 miners, 7d emission 0.12%; no paying-customer evidence | 6.7 | 0.04% |
| 33 | ReadyAI | Afterparty Inc (David Fields, Dan Rahmel, Eytan Elbaz, Robert Graham) — Los Angeles, CA, USA | Turn unstructured text/conversations into structured, labelled datasets via API. | Enterprise data customers | "five paying customers" — team-stated; https://subnetalpha.ai/subnet/readyai/; 2026 | @ReadyAI_ (3.6k followers) | **LIVE-PAYING** — team names paying customers; 244 miners, 0.29% emission | 5.0 | 0.08% |
| 42 | Gopher (on-chain "Unknown") | Gopher-lab (Brendan Playford; ex-Masa) — unknown (Playford US-based [unverified]) | Fetch real-time X/web data via Gopher's data API for agents. | AI agent developers | "~$1M ARR" — team-reported in 2026 interviews/posts [unverified] | @gopher_ai (206k followers; inherited Masa audience) | **LIVE-PAYING** — paid data API; but on-chain name "Unknown", 1 miner, 7d emission 0.0% (subnet identity in flux) | 2.8 | 0.00% |
| 27 | Orion | SILX AI (same team as SN24) — London, UK | Intended: data/RAG storage layer for Quasar models; no clear user product. | no users yet | none found | none (shares SN24 handle) | **STALLED** — 1 miner, 7d emission 0.0%, no distinct product or posts in 60+ days | 2.5 | 0.00% |
| 72 | StreetVision by NATIX | NATIX Network (Solana DePIN "Internet of Cameras"; team not named in subnet sources) — unknown (NATIX Network is Germany-based [unverified]) | Query continuously improved image classifiers that flag roadwork and construction in street-level imagery for mapping and autonomous driving. | NATIX's own mapping/AV data business; no other users | none found for the subnet | @NATIXNetwork (136,859, parent company) | **STALLED** — repo last push 7 May 2026 (133 days), 7d emission 0.0%, 1 miner | 2.5 | 0.00% |
| 101 | Tag101 | unknown (GitHub user tag101-ai, 1 repo, 0 stars) — based: unknown | Turn raw X posts into structured semantic tags. | no users yet | 226 active miners yet 0.0% emission; taostats on-chain fields; 17 Sep 2026 | none found | **STALLED** — 0.0% emission, no X account, no product page, last push 31 Aug 2026 | 2.3 | 0.00% |
| 119 | CapabilityForge Next | unknown (GitHub user created 8 Sep 2026) — based: unknown | Submit traceable training-data improvements for learning-oriented AI and get rewarded on reproducible evaluation. | none | none found | @capabilityforge — suspended | **STALLED** — X suspended, 0.0% emission, 1 active miner, repo created 9 Sep 2026 (identity relaunch) | 1.2 | 0.00% |

### Agents and tools: coding agents, assistants, gateways, marketplaces

*What it lets a person do without permission: Ship an agent and be paid for how well it works; or use one that competing strangers built.*

| SN | Name | Team, where based | Product (one sentence) | Who uses it | One hard number (source; date) | X | Status and evidence | Mcap $M | Em. share |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 62 | Ridges | Ridges AI, merged operations with Latent Holdings (2026); founders not publicly named in sources checked; formerly Agentao — unknown (US [unverified]) | Assign a GitHub issue to Ridgeline and an autonomous coding agent (built by competing miners, inference via SN4/SN64) writes and tests the patch. | Developers in open beta (10 free credits, no paywall); no paying customers disclosed | Top agent "~96% across 135 problems" on Polyglot Python with test patch; https://taodaily.io/ridges-ai-sets-a-new-standard-for-open-source-coding-agents/; 2026 | @ridges_ai (8,124) | **LIVE** — Ridgeline open beta since 6 Mar 2026, Harbor evaluation live; no paying-customer evidence | 13.4 | 0.97% |
| 15 | ORO | ORO AI (Shardul Bansal CEO, Seth Schilbe CTO; ex-AWS); backers Crucible Labs, Unsupervised Capital; Y Combinator Fall 2026 — Vancouver, Canada | Submit a Python shopping agent to a daily competition against 2.5M real products; the best agents are paid and their trajectories train an open shopping model. | Agent builders (miners); no customers yet | "$200,000+" paid to "1,206 unique miners" in 36 days; @oroagents https://x.com/oroagents/status/2054985113612722559 (14 May) and 20 May 2026; "$1M in cumulative payouts" (@shardiban, 4 Aug 2026) | @oroagents (2.5k) | **LIVE** — emissions-funded competition; no customers; owner wallet hacked ~$630K (13 Jul 2026) | 10.5 | 3.54% |
| 11 | TrajectoryRL | Hanlin AI (pseudonymous devs "Renning22", "Crabbytt") — Palo Alto, CA, USA (X bio) | Contribute RL trajectories/environments for agent training and earn TAO; use the resulting agent policies (in development). | Miners; no external customers | none found | @TrajectoryRL (113 followers) | **LIVE** — 0.76% emission, repo active; but only 1 active miner and no external product | 9.5 | 0.57% |
| 114 | SOMA | Dendrite (DendriteHQ), founded 2022, claims "50+ engineers"; co-founder "Oli" public; also runs SimplyTao and co-builds SN3 Teutonic, SN66 Conjectures — based: unknown | Route LLM calls through SOMA to compress context and chain-of-thought and pay less per token. | AI-agent developers; no named customers | DeepSeek V4 Pro $1.19 vs $1.32 per 1M tokens (~10% off); thesoma.ai; 17 Sep 2026 (40 active miners) | @SomaSubnet (836); @DendriteHQ (620) | **LIVE** — gateway live for one model, others "coming soon"; 2.73% emission; price +59%/1m | 7.2 | 2.00% |
| 71 | Leadpoet | Leadpoet (CEO Gavin Zaentz, CTO Pranav Ramesh, both ex-Nasdaq); incubated by DSV Fund; investor Astrid Intelligence PLC — New York City, USA | Receive verified, intent-scored B2B sales leads (name, title, verified email plus the buying signals that triggered the match) sourced by competing AI agents. | Sales teams (demo booking); no named customers | none disclosed (728 commits/30d, SubnetRadar 17 Sep 2026) | @LeadpoetAI (2,909); also @subnet71 | **LIVE** — heavy development and paid-request track exists, but 7d emission 0.0%, 1 active miner, no customer evidence | 4.6 | 0.00% |
| 118 | Ditto | Ditto AI ("Omni Aura"); founder Omar Barazanji (GitHub omarzanji) — USA (GitHub org + LinkedIn) | Give Claude, Cursor, OpenClaw and Hermes agents one shared persistent memory and file workspace over MCP; bring your own AI at zero LLM cost. | 2,500+ users (team-claimed) | "Users 2,500+ / 58,000+" (prompts); heyditto.ai; 17 Sep 2026 | @heydittoai (1,629) | **LIVE** — app live, 1.23% emission; no paying-customer evidence | 4.6 | 0.40% |
| 74 | Gittensor | Ventura Labs (Alexander "Ander"/KimboLogic, Grant "Mango", Landon "Lando"); GitHub org entrius; Ventura acquired SN74 and SN7 late 2025 — unknown (US [unverified]) | Connect a GitHub PAT, get pull requests merged into whitelisted open-source repos and get paid TAO scored on code quality, repo weight and language. | Open-source developers (miners); repo maintainers; no paying customers | "Monthly reward pools are already around $125,258", "over 200,000 lines of production code"; https://taodaily.io/gittensor-pays-developers-for-contributing-to-open-source-projects-on-bittensor/; late 2025/2026 | @gittensor_io (804) | **LIVE** — 148 commits/30d, 10 miners, but 7d emission 0.0% under the price-based emission model | 3.6 | 0.00% |
| 121 | sundae_bar | Sundae Bar AI PLC (AIM: SBAR), London-listed; acquired SN121 Jun 2025 — London, UK | Businesses rent AI agents/skills from a marketplace; developers compete on SN121 to build "The Generalist Agent" whose winning version is deployed to paying customers. | paying business customers ("has paying customers", RNS Aug 2026); 500+ skills/agents listed | £719,892 revenue and other operating income, six months to 31 Mar 2026; investegate.co.uk RNS (sundae_bar Platform Update & Name Change); Aug 2026 | @sundaebar_ai (1,282) | **LIVE-PAYING** — listed-company revenue and paying customers; but subnet itself has 0.0% emission, 1 active miner, repo last push 14 Aug 2026 | 2.8 | 0.00% |
| 98 | NeverPlayAlone | "Never Play Alone" (GitHub org, unnamed) — based: unknown | Host a Minecraft server populated by AI companions that play alongside humans. | gamers; no users evidenced | none found | @neverplayalone_ — suspended | **STALLED** — X suspended, 1 active miner, 0.04% emission, no live server evidenced (repo pushed 9 Sep 2026) | 2.1 | 0.01% |
| 31 | rec4ll | unknown (netuid reused from NASChain; new owner not identified) — based: unknown | Intended: agent memory / recall layer; nothing usable yet. | no users yet | none found | @rec4ll (2 followers, 9 tweets) | **STALLED** — registered Dec 2025, 1 miner, 7d emission 0.0%, no product | 1.4 | 0.00% |
| 87 | Provenonce | Provenonce ("OnChain Identity"); founder & CEO Will O'Brien — California, USA (founder X bio) | Enterprises get verified, auditable execution of agentic workflows ("Proof of Assurance"). | no users yet (1 active miner) | none found | @willobrien (founder; 3,059 followers); @Provenonce (1 follower) | **STALLED** — 0.0% emission, 1 active miner, no GitHub repo, only an on-chain description | 1.3 | 0.00% |
| 99 | Thirty Spokes | unknown ("No operator" — site) — based: unknown | Point any LLM client at one hub with `model="auto"` and competing routing agents send each request to the best provider per quality-per-dollar. | no users yet | none found | none found (@ThirtySpokes is a Louisville band) | **STALLED** — 2 active miners, 0.01% emission, no public repo, price −37%/1m; slot previously carried "neza" video identity (backprop.finance) | 0.3 | 0.00% |
| 76 | Ormas | Heron Cove LLC (GitHub heroncovelabs) — New York, USA (X bio) | Post a coding change plus acceptance tests, take a firm USD bid from a miner and pay only after validators re-run the tests and accept. | no users yet (registered 5 Sep 2026) | none found | @OrmasAI (7) | **LIVE** — pre-launch build: 53 commits/30d, repo pushed 17 Sep 2026; 7d emission 0.0%, 1 miner, no product surface yet | 0.1 | 0.00% |

### Knowledge and search: search, research, evaluation, security testing

*What it lets a person do without permission: Get sourced answers, detect fakes, or get paid to break systems before attackers do.*

| SN | Name | Team, where based | Product (one sentence) | Who uses it | One hard number (source; date) | X | Status and evidence | Mcap $M | Em. share |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 61 | RedTeam | Innerworks (CEO Oliver Quie, CTO Oscar Hayek); ~20 staff; $4M seed led by AlbionVC with DCG; incubated by GTV, Yuma, DCG — London, UK (engineering) / Mexico (CEO) | Buy bot-detection, device-binding and jurisdiction signals that are continuously hardened by a global network of miners paid to break them. | Major crypto exchanges; Web2 payments/BNPL platforms (revenue 50/50 fiat vs crypto) | "seven-figure annualized revenue", "90%+ gross margins"; https://taodaily.io/how-innerworks-built-redteam-sn61-into-a-seven-figure-business/; 11 Aug 2026 [team statement on Revenue Search podcast] | none official found (@theredteamio, @RedTeamSN61, @innerworks_me not found; @innerworksHQ exists with 0 followers) | **LIVE-PAYING** — usage-based B2B SaaS revenue disclosed on air; 7d emission 1.41%, price +107% in 1 month | 19.8 | 1.88% |
| 1 | Apex | Macrocosmos (Will Squires CEO, Steffen Cruz CTO) — London, UK | Submit an open-source agent to weekly agentic-benchmark competitions and earn TAO if it ranks; use the winning agents through Macrocosmos' Apex app/API. | Agent builders/miners; Macrocosmos' own products; no named external customers | Team claims ~£120k paid out to competitors and 85k+ agent submissions [unverified — figure from Macrocosmos X/blog posts mid-2026, exact URL not captured] | @MacrocosmosAI (7.6k followers; shared with SN9/SN13) | **LIVE** — weekly competitions and payouts running, but 7d emission 0.05% and only 3 active miners; no external paying customer found | 8.1 | 0.02% |
| 63 | Enigma | qBitTensor Labs (Bob Wold), same team as SN48 — unknown (US [unverified]) | Post or compete for bounties to break cryptographic schemes (post-quantum first), smart contracts or AI systems; winners are verified and open-sourced. | Sponsors/companies stress-testing systems; none named | none found | @EnigmaSN63 (624); @qbittensorlabs (4,546) | **LIVE** — repo pushed 16 Sep 2026, 13 commits/30d, 7d emission 0.41%; price −41% in 1 month | 5.8 | 0.09% |
| 60 | Bitsec.ai | Bitsec AI; founder John Yu (@yubrew); senior AI engineer Greg Schwartz — unknown (US [unverified]) | Point AI security agents at your codebase or smart contracts and get a vulnerability report (file, line, exploit chain, economic impact) on a monthly subscription. | Blockchain dev teams (inbound leads; conversion 1–2 weeks per founder); other subnets (found GPU attack on SN51) | none disclosed (production runs "100M tokens per project"; founder interview via vanlett.com/bitsecai, 2026) | @bitsecai (2,407) | **LIVE** — V2 live, subscription model and "portion of revenue" to buybacks stated by founder, but no named paying customer or revenue figure [unverified] | 5.0 | 0.00% |
| 23 | Trishool | Astroware (Nav Kumar, Preetham Sathyamurthy) — Dubai, UAE (also UK/India links) | Run AI security red-teaming / vulnerability testing on models and apps through competing miners. | Enterprises via Astroware; Google for Startups Web3 cohort | none found | @trishoolai (1.3k followers) | **LIVE** — website and pilots, Google for Startups program; only 2 miners, 7d emission 0.0% | 4.8 | 0.00% |
| 111 | Claims | DeSciClaims (GitHub org), unnamed — based: unknown | Run a miner that extracts claim–evidence pairs from papers; the audited output forms a queryable scientific claim graph. | researchers; no named customers | v0.2.0 released 14 Sep 2026, 75 commits/30d; subnetradar.com/subnet/111; 17 Sep 2026 | @DeSciClaims (615) | **LIVE** — active dev, 0.5% emission, 5 active miners; no customers | 4.5 | 0.10% |
| 32 | ItsAI | ITSAI Technologies FZCO (Sergey Volnov, Nikita Chervov) — Dubai, UAE (team in Germany/Netherlands) | Paste text and detect whether it was AI-generated, via web app, API or browser extension. | Educators, publishers, developers (paid API) | "#1 on MGTD benchmark"; "~22k monthly website visits" — team/benchmark; https://its-ai.org; 2026 [unverified exact figures] | @ai_detection (1.8k followers) | **LIVE-PAYING** — paid API/pro tiers live, 239 miners; 7d emission 0.06% | 3.9 | 0.01% |
| 22 | Desearch | Datura Labs (Giga Chkhikvadze CEO, Mirian Okradze CTO, "Pierre/Fish") — Tbilisi, Georgia + Nevis + California [unverified split] | Run AI-powered web/X search with citations via API or web app, priced per request. | Developers (API), other subnets, retail users | ">1.1M searches" served, usage-based pricing live; https://www.desearch.ai/blog/decentralized-search-engine-desearch-bittensor; 2026 | @desearch_ai (1.7k followers) | **LIVE-PAYING** — paid API tiers live; 132 miners; 7d emission 0.0% | 3.4 | 0.00% |
| 37 | Aurelius | Aurelius Labs Inc (Austin McCaffrey, Coleman Maher) — San Francisco Bay Area, USA | Contribute/adjudicate moral-reasoning dilemmas to build an alignment dataset; download the open dataset. | Alignment researchers; no customers | none found | @AureliusAligned (713 followers) | **LIVE** — repo and dataset active, founder interviews 2026; 1 miner, 7d emission 0.0% | 3.4 | 0.00% |
| 20 | Witness | Witness (ChronoSeek team; founders not named) — based: unknown | Intended: verifiable video/visual understanding benchmarks; currently testnet-style activity, no public product. | no users yet | none found | none verified (@witnessvision appears unrelated [unverified]) | **LIVE** — repo commits and testing in last 60 days but no user-facing product; 7d emission 0.0%, 2 miners (borderline STALLED) | 2.6 | 0.00% |
| 100 | Cortex (rebranding to "Base") | Cortex Foundation / BaseIntelligence (GitHub CortexLM); founders not named — USA (GitHub org location) [unverified] | Earn bounties for finding bugs in the Cortex IDE alpha and win agent-coding research challenges; relaunching as "Base" with a Rust control plane. | miners only; no external customers | 160 GitHub stars (CortexLM/cortex; 17 Sep 2026); "320,000 SN100 tokens locked" (Aug 2026 announcement via subnetalpha.ai/subnet/platform) | @CortexLM (517); @base_bittensor not found via fxtwitter [unverified] | **STALLED** — 0.0% emission, 1 active miner; rebrand/relaunch to Base announced Aug 2026, repo pushed 16 Sep 2026 | 1.8 | 0.00% |
| 67 | Harnyx | anonymous (no names on site, GitHub or X; contact email only) — based: unknown | Query a deep-research API that returns sourced, traceable answers produced by competing sandboxed research agents (Phase 1: parity with best deep-research tools; enterprise TEE tier planned). | no users yet (API for agent builders planned) | none found | @harnyx_ai (358) | **LIVE** — 121 commits/30d, 142 miners, 7d emission 0.25%; no external users | 1.3 | 0.06% |
| 26 | Perturb | Perturb (Koyuki Nakamori, Jeffrey Lamb, Vadym Shakuro) — based: unknown | Submit adversarial perturbations to stress-test vision/LLM models and earn; buy robustness reports. | AI teams needing robustness evals; no named customers | none found | @perturbaix (226 followers) | **LIVE** — registered May 2026, 10 miners, whitepaper live; 7d emission 0.11% | 1.2 | 0.03% |
| 36 | Epago | Epago Foundation (pseudonymous devs "Kichjang", "Kat_frenone") — based: unknown | Intended: "open intelligence layer" for humans and agents (knowledge Q&A); no public user product yet. | no users yet | none found | @epagofoundation (9 followers) | **STALLED** — registered Aug 2026, 2 miners, 7d emission 0.0%, no launched product | 0.6 | 0.00% |

### Finance and prediction: trading signals, forecasts, prediction markets, DeFi

*What it lets a person do without permission: Sell a forecast or a trading signal on merit, with no fund, licence or employer.*

| SN | Name | Team, where based | Product (one sentence) | Who uses it | One hard number (source; date) | X | Status and evidence | Mcap $M | Em. share |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 8 | Vanta | Taoshi Inc (Arrash Yasavolian CEO) — San Francisco, CA, USA | Submit live trading signals (forex/crypto/equities) as a miner and get paid for risk-adjusted performance; copy the top strategies via Taoshi's products. | Quant traders (miners); Taoshi's trading products/partners (e.g. Glitch Financial [unverified]) | ">$700k in rewards paid to traders" — Taoshi/Vanta communications; @VantaTrading / taoshi.io; 2026 [unverified exact post] | @VantaTrading (9.4k followers) | **LIVE-PAYING** — 2.39% emission share, Taoshi monetises signals through its own products; external revenue amount not disclosed | 33.0 | 3.53% |
| 77 | Liquidity | CreativeBuilds (pseudonymous solo builder, @CreativeBuilds) — based: unknown | Provide Uniswap V3 liquidity to the pools SN77 token holders vote for and earn TAO emissions; as a project, direct emissions to deepen your own token's pool. | Token projects and LPs; no external customers | none found | @77Liquidity (274); builder @CreativeBuilds (3,671) | **LIVE** — 7d emission 0.51%, 11 miners; repo last push 24 Jun 2026 (85 days, mechanism runs without new code) | 6.7 | 0.14% |
| 41 | Almanac | Sportstensor (Leo Chan, "Stephen/Neuromancer") — based: unknown | Get probability forecasts for sports and Polymarket events from competing models. | Bettors, Polymarket traders; Sportstensor app users | none found | @almnc_ai (2.0k followers) | **LIVE** — 96 miners, 0.35% emission, Polymarket integration live; no paying customers shown | 5.5 | 0.11% |
| 50 | Synth | Mode Network (Ethereum L2) co-founded the subnet; team members not named — based: unknown | Query an API for full probability distributions of asset price paths (1,000 simulated paths, CRPS-scored) for options pricing, liquidation risk and trading agents — now restricted to enterprise/research partners under NDA. | Mode's AI Terminal/DeFAI agents; funds and trading desks under NDA; Polymarket bots (self-serve access ended Jul 2026) | $100,000 alpha buyback over 8 weeks after a "profitable Q2 2026", first purchase 9,965.64 SN50 at $1.50; https://taodaily.io/synth-sn50-is-reborn-with-fresh-trading-mandate-and-100k-in-buybacks/; Jul 2026 | @SynthdataCo (7,450) | **LIVE-PAYING** — team says Q2 2026 profitable, top-10 revenue subnet, integration fees charged [team-reported; one analyst says buyback was funded by TAO rewards not client revenue — conflict, see notes] | 5.3 | 0.07% |
| 43 | Graphite | GraphiteAI (pseudonymous) — based: unknown | Query a Financial Knowledge Graph API (entity/relationship data) built by miners; originally graph-optimisation (TSP) solving. | Fintech developers | none found | @GraphiteSubnet (688 followers) | **LIVE-PAYING** — team says API has paying users; 5 miners, 7d emission 0.0% | 5.1 | 0.00% |
| 30 | Endure Network | SubConnect / WahooPredict (pseudonymous) — based: unknown | Intended: DeFi risk-modelling / prediction-market data; pivoted from prediction markets, mainnet product not launched. | no users yet | none found | @EndureNet (617 followers) | **STALLED** — pre-mainnet, 1 miner, 7d emission 0.0% | 4.2 | 0.00% |
| 88 | Investing (Investing88) | Mobius Fund, a Texas Registered Investment Adviser (GitHub bio); founders not named — Houston, Texas, USA (X bio) | Submit a portfolio-allocation strategy (Python dict or no-code) and earn emissions when it out-performs; winning strategies steer the "88 Quant Fund". | miner-strategists; fund investors [unverified] | 56 active miners; taostats on-chain fields; 17 Sep 2026. AUM not disclosed on investing88.ai | @Investing88ai (2,038) | **LIVE** — repo mobiusfund/investing pushed 7 Sep 2026, 56 miners, 0.09% emission; no disclosed external paying customers | 3.9 | 0.02% |
| 79 | MVTRX | taos.im; "one primary contributor" (pseudonymous); formerly branded TAOS — based: unknown | Run a trading agent against a C++ multi-order-book market simulator with full L3 data and get scored on risk-adjusted returns; team says it is building a dTAO exchange on top. | Quant researchers/miners; no external customers | none found | @mvtrx_79 (980); @taos_im (98) | **LIVE** — repo pushed 16 Sep 2026, 216 miners, 7d emission 0.1%; only 1 validator; price −50% in 1 month | 3.6 | 0.02% |
| 6 | Numinous | Numinous Labs (Marc Graczyk, Bruno Camargo) — unknown (team members US/Brazil-linked [unverified]) | Submit probabilistic forecasts on real-world events (Metaculus/Polymarket-style questions) and get scored/paid; consume the aggregated forecasts via API. | Forecasters/miners; Numinous' own prediction dashboard; no named customers | none found | @numinous_ai (1.8k followers) | **LIVE** — 116 miners actively forecasting, dashboard online; 7d emission only 0.04% | 3.3 | 0.01% |
| 7 | Allways | Entrius (pseudonymous; "Landyn" cited as lead) — based: unknown | Swap tokens cross-chain (Bittensor ↔ Solana, others) with no bridge/wrapping, from a wallet or an agent, paying a swap fee. | Retail swappers, AI agents (agent-ready native swap API) | 1% swap fee model live; https://all-ways.io/agents; 2026 (volume not disclosed) | @allways_io (95 followers) | **LIVE-PAYING** — fee-charging swap product live (retail users pay), but only 4 miners and 7d emission 0.04% | 3.1 | 0.01% |
| 89 | InfiniteQuant | pseudonymous GitHub user "DeltaCompute24" (same account previously ran InfiniteHash on SN89) — based: unknown | Submit directional trade calls with fixed 1:1 take-profit/stop-loss, prove your hit-rate over an 8-day warm-up, then earn pro-rata emissions per win. | miner-traders; signal consumers unnamed | 107 active miners; taostats on-chain fields; 17 Sep 2026 | none found (taostats blank; @infinitequant is an unrelated Bahamas account) | **LIVE** — repo pushed 17 Sep 2026 (61 commits/30d per subnetradar.com/subnet/89), 107 miners, 0.09% emission; no paying customers | 3.1 | 0.02% |
| 45 | AlphaRidge.ai | Team Rizzo (Rizzo validator team); formerly Gen42, then Talisman AI, rebranded AlphaRidge 2026 — based: unknown | Pull real-time market-intelligence and verified crypto/social sentiment (equities, FX, crypto, commodities) from a feed built by miners scanning X; designed to feed trading recommendations into the Talisman wallet. | Talisman wallet (intended integration); no named external customers | none found | @alpharidge_ai (54) | **LIVE** — repo pushed 17 Sep 2026, 69 commits/30d (SubnetRadar), 206 miners, but 7d emission 0.0% | 2.6 | 0.00% |
| 123 | MANTIS | solo pseudonymous developer "Barbarian" / "Atlas" (X @Barbarian7676, GitHub Barbariandev); one minor contributor "s0wa48"; grew up partly in Costa Rica (podcast) — unknown (X: "Earth") | Submit encrypted embeddings/predictions for 11 market challenges (BTC, FX, funding rates, breakouts) and get paid by your information value to the ensemble. | no external customers (hedge-fund / PTN monetisation planned since 2025) | 250 active miners; taostats on-chain fields; 17 Sep 2026 | @Barbarian7676 (1,738); no official MANTIS account (@mantis123 is unrelated) | **LIVE** — repo pushed 13 Sep 2026, 250 miners; but 0.0% emission (chain not funding it) | 2.2 | 0.00% |
| 127 | Astrid | Astrid Intelligence PLC (AQSE: ASTR); Chairman Mark Creaser (DSV Fund CEO), CEO Siam Kidd, Bittensor Strategist Léo Mercier — UK-headquartered (Creaser based in Dubai) | Submit trading agents to Astrid Arena (formerly SigmaArena), which paper-trades them under live market conditions and pays the best performers. | no external customers; company books emissions as operating income | none found (TAO holdings "up 1,013%" in Nov 2025 RNS) | none found for the subnet; @MarkCreaser (14,775) | **STALLED** — 0.0% emission, 1 active miner, repo astridintelligence/sn-127 last push 28 Jul 2026 | 1.7 | 0.00% |
| 58 | greevils | Greevils team (anonymous; GitHub org created 9 Jun 2026) — based: unknown | Deploy your trading agent inside your own Intel TDX confidential VM and get scored on how your real Hyperliquid account performs (emissions 90% agents / 10% humans). | Agent builders/miners; no external customers | 256/256 UIDs filled ("saturated"); https://dtaoscan.io/subnet/58; 29 Aug 2026 | @greevils_ai (140) | **LIVE** — 7d emission 1.55% flowing to a single earning miner (uid 37 at 100% incentive); repo last push 6 Jul 2026 (73 days) [whether agents are actively trading is unverified] | 0.9 | 0.27% |
| 109 | Finsight | unnamed; "Built for Canadians by Canadians" — Canada (Toronto per X) | Free portfolio tracker for TFSA/RRSP with CRA-ready adjusted-cost-base and news-scored action plans. | Canadian retail investors (free tier) | none found | @Finsighttech (0 followers, 1 tweet) | **STALLED** — 0.0% emission, 1 active miner, no repo, no subnet mechanism published | 0.8 | 0.00% |
| 113 | TensorUSD | TensorUSD; founder/CEO Khem Raj Regmi; advisor Ajit Khanal; contributors in Nepal/Germany/UK — Germany (CEO); LinkedIn company HQ listed as Philadelphia, USA | Lock TAO as collateral to mint TUSDT, a $1 stablecoin; miners run liquidation auctions and the price oracle. | Bittensor DeFi users; adoption not disclosed | none found (TUSDT supply not published); 2 active miners | @TensorUSD (561); founder @iamkhemrajregmi (226) | **LIVE** — contracts on Bittensor EVM listed in README, repo pushed 16 Sep 2026; 0.0% emission | 0.8 | 0.00% |

### Media: image, video, 3D, creator and ad markets

*What it lets a person do without permission: Make or verify media; get paid as a creator for verified attention.*

| SN | Name | Team, where based | Product (one sentence) | Who uses it | One hard number (source; date) | X | Status and evidence | Mcap $M | Em. share |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 44 | Score | Score Technologies (Max Sebti CEO, Tim Kalic CTO, Nigel Grant CSO; chairman Matthew Cyzer, ex-Goldman); enterprise front end Manako; team of 13 — New York, USA [unverified — IQ.wiki; company registration not confirmed] | Point any camera feed at Score Studio and get a small, miner-proven vision model that turns live video into real-time structured analytics (sports first). | Enterprise via Manako: PwC France alliance; sports clubs (Reading FC per team posts [unverified]); Kraken-listed token | "Manako × @PwC_France We've formed an alliance to bring physical AI to enterprise at global scale."; https://x.com/manakoai/status/2044445879554412571; 15 Apr 2026. SubConnect ARR estimate $1–2M (third-party, Aug 2026) | @webuildscore (9,822) | **LIVE-PAYING** — Big-Four alliance and paid enterprise pilots via Manako; Sebti admits not break-even (SimplyTao interview, 9 Jun 2026) | 47.6 | 4.69% |
| 93 | Bitcast | Bitcast; brothers Tom Blears (CEO) and Will Blears (CTO) — United Kingdom (Will nomadic, Europe/Asia) | Brands post briefs, YouTube/X creators publish qualifying content and get paid on verified attention. | brands (unnamed) and 1.2K creators | Q2 2026 revenue $105,499 vs $101,841 paid to miners (SubConnect, Aug 2026); $435.2K cumulative revenue, $261.8K buybacks, 1.2K creators (stats.bitcast.network, 17 Sep 2026) | @Bitcast_network (3,810) | **LIVE-PAYING** — dashboard reports $435K brand revenue recycled into SN93 buybacks; 2.29% emission | 20.0 | 2.60% |
| 34 | BitMind | BitMind (Ken Miyachi, Dylan Uys) — San Francisco, CA, USA [unverified] | Upload an image/video and get a deepfake/AI-generated detection score via app, extension or API. | Consumers, platforms integrating detection API | "deployed in 100+ countries", "millions of users" — team-stated; https://bitmind.ai / @BitMindAI; 2026 [unverified] | @BitMindAI (7.8k followers) | **LIVE-PAYING** — paid API, 1.08% emission, 101 miners | 14.1 | 1.10% |
| 17 | 404—GEN | 404 (Ben James CEO) — Switzerland (Zug [unverified]) | Generate 3D assets (Gaussian splats) from text/image prompts in seconds via API/Discord/Unity plugin. | Game devs, creators; via Unity/Blender plugins | none found | @404gen_ (4.2k followers) | **LIVE** — 0.86% emission, product usable; only 1 active miner, no revenue disclosed | 11.8 | 0.67% |
| 85 | Vidaio | Vidaio; founder Gareth Howells (20+ years media tech: Netflix, Disney, Sony, Spotify cited); lead dev "christopi"/Bruhvatar — UK [unverified — London JV partner, founder UK-based per talks] | Upload a video to Video Studio (beta) or the API and get it AI-upscaled or compressed by competing miners benchmarked against Topaz. | Pip Studios (London post-production JV; Netflix/Amazon/Sony work flows through Pip); Canal+ subsidiary Thema 30-day trial; creators | ClipIQA+ 0.4697 vs Topaz 0.4658 (self-reported benchmark); https://subnetradar.com/research/subnets/85; 2026. "about $3,000 being handed out by the Vid IO network per day to miners" (Mark Jeffrey, TWiST, 12 Mar 2026 — emissions, not revenue) | @vidaio_ (2,646) | **LIVE** — JV and trial announced, no payment terms disclosed; 7d emission 0.17%, only 2 validators | 5.8 | 0.06% |
| 21 | AdTAO | iPPC / InvisiblePPC (Rob Warner) — Melton Mowbray, Leicestershire, UK | Connect a Google Ads account and get AI-optimised campaign management from competing miners. | SMB advertisers, PPC agencies | "20,000+ connected Google Ads accounts" (iPPC's existing customer base) — team-stated in founder interview; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYjASFUtCpg; 2026 | @ppcrebel (375 followers; founder handle) / @AdTao_AI (10 followers) | **LIVE** — product live on agency base; no evidence that subnet-driven ads are separately paid; 7d emission 0.08% | 3.9 | 0.03% |
| 69 | Herald | Herald Media (no named team; reuses Bitcast's settlement design; DSV funds coverage briefs) — based: unknown | As a PR operator, commit to an outlet, get an editorial article published and earn emissions once a code-only oracle verifies it is live, editorial, indexed and persistent; as a brand, fund a brief and pay only for verified coverage. | PR firms and outlet owners (miners); DSV as brief funder; no named brands | none found | @HeraldMedia (0 followers) [unverified as official] | **LIVE** — registered 8 May 2026, 7 commits/30d, 7d emission 0.37%; no paying-customer evidence | 2.7 | 0.40% |
| 126 | Attelier | unknown (GitHub org attelierai created 2 Sep 2026, 0 public repos) — based: unknown | Generate video clips through an API and creator app (claimed). | none | none found | @attelier_ai (448 followers, 2 tweets) | **STALLED** — slot rebranded from Poker44 (poker bot detection) around Sep 2026, linked repo 404, 0.0% emission, 1 active miner | 1.6 | 0.00% |
| 115 | MoirAI | unknown (GitHub user moirai115 created 3 Sep 2026) — based: unknown | Turn an idea into finished AI-generated content through a distributed creator harness. | none | none found | none found | **STALLED** — 0.0% emission, 1 active miner, repo 0 stars created 3 Sep 2026 | 1.2 | 0.00% |

### Science: drug discovery, genomics, math, weather, robotics

*What it lets a person do without permission: Get paid for a proof, a molecule, a forecast or a robot policy that beats the current best.*

| SN | Name | Team, where based | Product (one sentence) | Who uses it | One hard number (source; date) | X | Status and evidence | Mcap $M | Em. share |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 68 | NOVA | Metanova Labs (CEO Micaela Bazo, CSO Pedro Penna, CTO/co-founder Amanda Casadei) — São Paulo, Brazil (Casadei LinkedIn) [company HQ unverified] | Submit candidate molecules or molecule-search code against weekly protein targets (e.g. IL-6) and earn if Boltz-2/PSICHIC re-scoring ranks you best; results are public and on-chain. | Metanova's own therapeutics R&D; pharma partners (none named) | "screened on the order of 4.8 million molecules against roughly 7,000 protein targets"; https://taoprotocol.org/nova-sn68-inside-metanovas-decentralized-drug-discovery-engine-and-its-new-il-6-target/; 2026 | @metanova_labs (4,565) | **LIVE** — 36 commits/30d, 7d emission 1.97%, SubnetRadar health 75/100; no paying customers | 25.4 | 2.74% |
| 107 | Minos | "Minos" — pseudonymous; GitHub contributors M. Ahangari (profile: UC San Diego, Key West FL; 23 commits) and Brian McCrindle (Vancouver; Macrocosmos employee; 2 commits) — unknown (contributor profiles point to USA/Canada) [unverified] | Submit tuned configs (later custom algorithms) for DNA variant callers; every 72 minutes validators re-run them on a genome with hidden synthetic mutations and the best takes the emissions. Shipped: minos_subnet v0.1.0 (Mar 2026), hosted platform api.theminos.ai, whitepaper PDF, Hippius (SN75) storage integration. | no external users yet; hospitals/biobanks/pharma targeted for Phase 4 | 10.97% of network TAO emission (7d avg) with 20 active miners; taostats on-chain fields; 10–17 Sep 2026. ~87% of per-round miner weight burned (subnetradar.com/subnet/107) | @theminos_ai (1,829) | **LIVE** — rounds running, repo pushed 4 Sep 2026; no customers | 19.1 | 6.71% |
| 80 | OpenRoboto | HackQuest-linked team (Cameron; founding engineer Fisher, ex-Northwestern robotics); GitHub org lists location China, members private — Shenzhen and Beijing, China | Fine-tune the open π0.5 vision-language-action model, submit weights on-chain and earn if you beat the champion on LIBERO-Pro; anyone can download the champion weights. | Robotics researchers/miners; factory pilots planned; no customers | Pushed π0.5 "from 50% to 85% on LIBERO-Pro in just 21 days"; https://taodaily.io/openroboto-sn80-and-the-robotics-gpt-moment-taking-shape-on-bittensor/; Aug 2026. 107 submissions at mainnet launch (tao.media, 29 Jul 2026) | @openroboto (2,953) | **LIVE** — mainnet since Jul 2026, 7d emission 3.6% (2nd-highest in slice after top-3), price +50% in 1 month | 11.0 | 2.93% |
| 124 | Swarm | small pseudonymous team ("Miguelikk", "S3333F") — based: unknown | Train drone flight policies against open simulation benchmarks (search-and-rescue, indoor interceptor) and get paid; the team also sells integration into real fleets. | defense/agri/inspection prospects; no named customers | 35 GitHub stars (swarm-subnet/swarm; 17 Sep 2026); 25 active miners | @SwarmSubnet (2,148) | **LIVE** — repo pushed 17 Sep 2026, 1.2% emission; services advertised, no customers evidenced | 9.7 | 0.98% |
| 83 | CliqueAI | TopTensor (anonymous; all commits by "toptensor-deployer") — based: unknown | Submit maximum-clique solutions to distributed NP-hard graph problems and earn by optimality and diversity. | no users yet (drug-discovery/fraud-ring use cases stated, none named) | none found | none found | **LIVE** — 7d emission 1.16%, 236 miners; repo last push 21 Jul 2026 (58 days), 0 commits/30d | 7.0 | 0.62% |
| 66 | Conjectures | Conjectures.io; co-built by Dendrite (pseudonymous studio, @DendriteHQ) with pseudonymous @Wejh69 who proposed the direction — unknown (Dendrite probably Europe — Paris/Proof of Talk presence [unverified]) | Submit a Lean-verified proof of an open mathematical conjecture (0.5 TAO submission fee) and get paid a bounty when the validator checks it. | Mathematicians and AI-prover teams; no external customers | Paid for "the near-half-density case of Green's Problem 51, open for 16 years"; https://x.com/conjectures_io/status/2097747177606967570; 9 Sep 2026 | @conjectures_io (1,093) | **LIVE** — 335 commits/30d, bounties paid (manually via 2-of-3 multisig); 7d emission 0.08%, price +73% in 1 month | 4.9 | 0.05% |
| 18 | Zeus | Ørpheus AI B.V. (Wouter Haringhuizen, Travis van Cornewal) — Amstelveen, Netherlands | Get hyper-local weather/climate forecasts from ML models competing on ERA5-scored accuracy. | Weather-data consumers, researchers; no named customers | none found | @zeussubnet (2.5k followers) | **LIVE** — 13 miners, forecasts served; 7d emission 0.11%; no paying customers | 4.7 | 0.03% |
| 49 | Nepher Robotics | Nepher (lead developer "akhenova"); NVIDIA Inception member — Seattle, WA, USA (X bio) | Train a reinforcement-learning robot-control policy and enter it in an NVIDIA Isaac Lab tournament where the single winner takes the round's emissions. | Robotics researchers/miners; no external customers | none found | @nepher_robotics (542) | **LIVE** — repo pushed 9 Sep 2026, 10 commits/30d, 7d emission 0.27%; only 1 active miner | 3.5 | 0.46% |
| 55 | NIOME | genomes.io (Genomes DAO) — London, UK (@genomes_io X bio) | Generate privacy-safe synthetic genomic datasets that preserve the statistics of real DNA for population-scale studies. | Researchers (target); no named customers | none found | @genomesio (49); parent @genomes_io (7) | **LIVE** — repo pushed 11 Sep 2026, 3 commits/30d, 7d emission 0.05%; thin activity | 3.3 | 0.01% |

### Other and unassigned slots

*What it lets a person do without permission: Slots with no identifiable product, parked or for sale, plus products that fit no layer.*

| SN | Name | Team, where based | Product (one sentence) | Who uses it | One hard number (source; date) | X | Status and evidence | Mcap $M | Em. share |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 73 | Parked | unknown — on-chain identity now "Parked"; slot previously ran MetaHash (alpha OTC/treasury settlement layer) whose domains went unreachable by Jun 2026 — based: unknown | Nothing usable; the slot is parked. | no users yet | 996,029.8 alpha locked under Conviction by 7 lockers; https://subnetradar.com/subnet/73; Sep 2026 | none | **STALLED** — "Parked" identity, 0 miners on bittensor.ai, 7d emission 0.0% | 3.0 | 0.00% |
| 112 | for sale | unknown — based: unknown | none | none | none found | none | **STALLED** — on-chain name "for sale", no description, 0.0% emission | 1.8 | 0.00% |
| 78 | Umi | Umi-BitSign; founder Koyuki Nakamori ("Special K", @knakamor; also SN26 Perturb; ex-OTF head of AI) — Los Angeles, CA (X bio) — founder described as Canadian applied mathematician [conflict; see notes] | Send American Sign Language video and get English text back from competing miners scored against references; pivoting to "Universal Motion Intelligence". | no users yet | none found (434 commits/30d, 246 miners; SubnetRadar 17 Sep 2026) | @umi_sn78 (240) | **LIVE** — heavy development, 7d emission 0.26%, price +73% in 1 month after pivot | 1.1 | 0.03% |
| 116 | Memo | unknown — based: unknown | none published | none | none found | none | **STALLED** — empty on-chain identity, 0.0% emission, registered 30 May 2026 | 0.8 | 0.00% |
| 122 | CookingTAO | unknown (GitHub org CookingTao, created Sep 2025) — based: unknown | Deploy, manage and monetize Bittensor miners through a no-code interface. | none evidenced | none found | @CookingTao_ (378) | **STALLED** — 0.0% emission, 1 active miner, slot re-registered 22 May 2026, no active repo | 0.7 | 0.00% |
| 57 | Unknown ("gaia"; ex-Sparket) | unknown — recycled slot registered 27 Apr 2026, no identity set. Previous occupant Sparket.AI (sports odds/prediction data, patent US20220188672A1) — based: unknown | Nothing usable on this slot; Sparket's beta (odds origination, outcome verification) ran on the previous registration. | no users yet | none found | none for slot; former @sparket_ai (0 followers, bio "Sparket Ai Moved" to Discord) | **STALLED** — no identity, 1 miner, 7d emission 0.0%, price −47% in 1 month | 0.6 | 0.00% |
| 82 | Compelle | Compelle (no named team) — "Athens and Jerusalem" (X bio) | Commit a written debate strategy on-chain and have LLMs (via Chutes) debate it Pro/Con each epoch; earn by Elo. | no users yet | none found | @compelleai (373) | **LIVE** — repo pushed 27 Aug 2026 but only 3 commits/30d, 7d emission 0.02%, 1 miner, SubnetRadar "Critical"; borderline STALLED | 0.6 | 0.00% |
| 84 | Unknown ("ansuz"; ex-ChipForge) | unknown — recycled slot registered 1 May 2026, no identity set. Previous occupant ChipForge by Tatsu (RISC-V/Verilog design competitions; chipforge.io), whose repos last pushed 25 Apr 2026 — based: unknown | Nothing identifiable on this slot; ChipForge's competitions ran on the previous registration. | no users yet | none found | none | **STALLED** — no identity, 52 miners / 1 validator, 7d emission 0.02% | 0.6 | 0.00% |
| 16 | kenju | unknown (no website/GitHub/X found; unrelated namesakes only) — based: unknown | No identifiable product. | no users yet | none found | none found | **STALLED** — registered Jun 2026, 1 miner, 7d emission 0.0%, mcap $0.2m, nothing published | 0.2 | 0.00% |
| 35 | Unknown (ex-Cartha) | unknown (re-registered 11 Sep 2026; prior occupant Cartha) — based: unknown | No product. | no users yet | none found | none | **STALLED** — "Unknown" name, registered 6 days ago, 1 miner, 7d emission 0.0% | 0.2 | 0.00% |
| 70 | Unknown ("ghayn") | unknown — recycled slot registered 12 Aug 2026, no identity set. Previous occupant NexisGen (video-dataset engine, RendixNetwork) told Discord the subnet was for sale on 20 Jul 2026 — based: unknown | Nothing usable on this slot. | no users yet | none found | none | **STALLED** — no identity, 1 miner, 7d emission 0.0%, price −65% in 1 month | 0.2 | 0.00% |
| 86 | Unknown ("kaunan") | anonymous four-member team (on-chain note mentions adding "a senior data scientist"; per SubnetRadar) — based: unknown | Nothing disclosed; stealth subnet. | no users yet | none found | none | **STALLED** — registered 24 Jul 2026, no product, no miners, 7d emission 0.0% | 0.2 | 0.00% |
| 59 | Unknown ("agent-arena") | unknown — recycled slot registered 27 Aug 2026, no identity set. SubnetRadar links babelbit.ai (Babelbit, London, low-latency speech-to-speech translation) as the new occupant [unverified] — unknown (Babelbit: London, UK per X bio, if confirmed) | Nothing usable on chain yet; Babelbit's stated product is live speech-to-speech translation. | no users yet | none found | none for slot; @babelbit (1,376) [unverified link to SN59] | **STALLED** — no identity, 1 miner, 7d emission 0.0%, registered 3 weeks ago | 0.1 | 0.00% |
### Notes and flags on the map

Netuid reuse and renames (old articles name the wrong project):
- SN3 Teutonic (was Templar / Covenant AI until Apr 2026; holders voted the slot to Jacob's team 14 Aug 2026). SN39 "deprecated" (was Basilica, Covenant). SN81 Reliquary (was Grail, Covenant; ownership "reclaimed after Covenant's departure", SubnetRadar 12 Sep 2026).
- SN8 Vanta (was PTN, Taoshi). SN19 blockmachine (was Nineteen). SN23 Trishool (was NicheImage → SocialTensor/Zuvu). SN46 Instant (was RESI → Zipcode). SN47 Feval (was Condenses). SN49 Nepher Robotics (was Polaris Cloud, deregistered 1 Nov 2025). SN53 Engy (took over dead EfficientFrontier slot, Jul 2026). SN65 True Performance Network (pivoted from a VPN to model compression). SN78 Umi (was Vocence). SN79 MVTRX (was TAOS). SN80 OpenRoboto (slot acquired Jul 2026; CSV registration date is the prior owner's). SN89 InfiniteQuant (was InfiniteHash). SN99 Thirty Spokes (was neza). SN100 Cortex (rebranding to "Base"). SN106 Nodexo (was a Solana LP subnet). SN125 Refinery (at least two prior identities). SN126 Attelier (was Poker44).
- Empty or placeholder identities re-registered in 2026: SN16 kenju, SN35 (ex-Cartha, 11 Sep), SN57 "gaia" (ex-Sparket), SN59 "agent-arena" (27 Aug; Babelbit linked but unconfirmed), SN70 "ghayn" (ex-NexisGen), SN73 Parked (ex-MetaHash; still ~1M alpha under Conviction lock), SN84 "ansuz" (ex-ChipForge), SN86 "kaunan", SN112 "for sale", SN116 Memo. These are the churn the emission gate is meant to price out.

Team-location and identity conflicts:
- Lium (SN51): founder pseudonymous; Datura AI's LinkedIn says HQ Nevis and "workforce is distributed across Georgia, Poland, and Spain"; Desearch (SN22) founders are verified in Tbilisi, Georgia; the `lium-io` repo's top contributors are pseudonymous. Say "Datura's search subnet is built in Tbilisi", not "Lium is Georgia-built".
- Actual (SN95): X bios say New York, SubnetRadar says Venice CA, LinkedIn says Los Angeles. Umi (SN78): X bio Los Angeles, founder Canadian. Score (SN44): New York per IQ.wiki, company registration not confirmed; team of 13 with a UK footprint.
- Affine (SN120): core team in China per Jacob's own Discord post (Jun 2026); no personal names or cities public.
- Shared handles: @MacrocosmosAI covers SN1, SN9, SN13. No official X for Teutonic (SN3), Hone (SN5), RedTeam (SN61), CliqueAI (SN83), Feval (SN47) or the placeholder slots. Suspended: @bitsota (SN94), @neverplayalone_ (SN98), @capabilityforge (SN119), @silxai (SN24/27 company).

Number conflicts:
- Minos (SN107): on-chain 7-day average 10.97% of pool-injected TAO vs SubnetRadar "6.70% · #4" the same day. Both put it in the top five; the on-chain figure is the direct measurement.
- Targon (SN4): "1,500+ H200s" (team, 2025) vs a few dozen to ~230 cards visible on-chain (12 Sep 2026). "$10.4M ARR" (team, 2025) vs $5.5–6M (SubConnect, Aug 2026).
- Synth (SN50): team says Q2 2026 profitable and the $100K buyback follows revenue; abittensorjourney.com says the buyback was funded by TAO rewards, not client revenue.
- Green Compute (SN110): "$82,000 in profitable revenue in the first month" is team-claimed; the site's testimonials read as placeholder copy and the security badges are unverifiable. Treat as unverified.
- ByteLeap (SN128) "5000+ Active GPU Servers" vs 11 active miners on-chain. Marketing.
- UR (SN25) "350k+ MAU", BitMind (SN34) "millions of users", Gopher (SN42) "~$1M ARR", Vanta (SN8) ">$700k in rewards": team statements, not audited.
- Emission-gate casualties with real products: Inference Labs DSperse (SN2), Data Universe (SN13), Desearch (SN22), UR (SN25), Gopher (SN42), Instant (SN46), Gittensor (SN74), Leadpoet (SN71) all show ~0% emission this week despite live products or heavy development. The chain is not funding them; their status in the table reflects the product, not the emission.

Related-party and insider notes a critic will raise:
- Rayon Labs runs SN64 Chutes, SN56 Gradients (and the SN19 slot was Nineteen); together ~23–24% of all emissions in Apr 2026.
- The Taostats team runs SN19 blockmachine and SN28 gm; its founder co-founded The Nerve Lab (SN75 Hippius). Blockmachine's RPC revenue is largely sold to Taostats.
- Jacob Steeves founded SN120 Affine (chief scientist), leads SN3 Teutonic, and the Albedo (SN97) mechanism was launched by an agent persona he created; Dendrite co-builds SN3, SN66, SN97 and owns SN114, and mines the subnets it builds ("transparent self-mining").
- KubeTEE (SN90): the owner's second company operates the miners; three miners draw ~4% of emission. Minos (SN107) burns ~87% of per-round miner weight (near winner-take-all) while taking the largest share of emission.
- Two listed companies own slots that earn ~0%: Sundae Bar AI PLC (SN121, AIM) and Astrid Intelligence PLC (SN127, AQSE).

---
## Deliverable 2. The faces: "we gave you a chance"

Seventeen founder, team and miner stories were checked (working file: 17 sections with seven items each). Twelve are recommended below, ranked by how well each stands up on stage, with the critic's line for each. Every quote is verbatim and linked. Item "Why not a lab or a VC" is stated only where the person or a reliable source said it; otherwise it says what the public record supports.

Constraint check: pseudonymous or anonymous teams: Fish (§2), the Affine team (§9), Dendrite (§12), "@hodler0_" (read-aloud). Outside the US and Europe: Tbilisi, Georgia (§4), China (§9), Kampala and Nairobi (§10), Hanoi (§11); Canada: §3, §5 and Oro. Solo builder: Pierre Manseau (§3); "Barbarian" (set aside) wrote 215 of 217 commits on two subnets. Individual miners who never owned a subnet: Vincent Rapido (§7), "@hodler0_".

### 1. Jon Durbin, Chutes (SN64), Rayon Labs. Score 5/5

- **Who**: @jon_durbin (7.2k followers); GitHub `jondurbin`. Founder of Chutes; entity Chutes Global Corp (Nevis). Also Gradients (SN56). New CEO Christian Hyland announced 7 Sep 2026; Durbin stays as builder (bio: "Human. Backend dev http://chutes.ai").
- **Where from**: United States. MS Computer Science, University of Michigan-Flint; about 15 years as a working software engineer (Arbor Networks, Zix, FICO, Endpoint Health, Onna), then "Independent AI Researcher - Self-employed". Known in open-source AI for the `airoboros` datasets (1,052 GitHub stars) and `bagel` fine-tunes. No frontier-lab pedigree, no PhD, no VC round. (LinkedIn; GitHub.)
- **Built**: A permissionless inference network where anonymous GPU providers serve open models inside TEEs. Numbers: 2.37M requests and 29.3B tokens a day (7-day average to 16 Sep 2026, api.chutes.ai); $1.13M revenue in the 90 days to 30 Aug 2026 (team dashboard via SubnetRadar); a 20B MoE pre-trained "for under $10 an hour of compute" on "Eight rented single-L40S VMs scattered across two continents" (@chutes_ai, 20 Jul 2026, https://x.com/chutes_ai/status/2079197210651001326).
- **Why not a lab or a VC**: he said so, twice.
  - "it acts as a completely decentralized VC fund in a way, so we don't have to go perform huge raises and give away large portions of the company in exchange for funding" — 14 Mar 2025, https://x.com/jon_durbin/status/1900540252982215138
  - "by allowing completely anonymous/permissionless access to mine, we now have roughly 150 unique providers of GPUs/infra on chutes, and each of those is acting as a site reliability engineer -- without this, we'd need a massive team and big DC contracts and such" — same post.
  - "For this to work in a traditional non-crypto way would bring necessity for VC funding, massive long term commits or purchases of hardware, insane regulatory burdens, etc." — 19 Jul 2025, https://x.com/jon_durbin/status/1946647138072478045
  - Team, 24 Aug 2026: "Chutes must become a network that outlasts any single company, team, or founder. Including us." — https://x.com/chutes_ai/status/2091888285748449320
- **Critic**: Rayon Labs' subnets took ~24% of all TAO emissions in Apr 2026 (ownyourmind.ai); revenue covers "thirty to forty percent of operating expenses" by the team's own statement (SubConnect, Aug 2026); daily tokens fell from a 160B peak (Jun 2025) to ~29B (Sep 2026); Durbin wrote in May 2025 that he could "no longer really afford the taxes for my share of owner emissions without selling" (https://x.com/jon_durbin/status/1922744095543291921); Nevis is an offshore structure.
- **Why it stands up**: the clearest first-person statement on the network of why a builder chose emissions over a cap table, from a Michigan backend engineer whose product is #2 by market cap.

### 2. "Fish", Lium (SN51) and Desearch (SN22), Datura. Score 5/5

- **Who**: @fish_datura (4.1k followers), display name "Fish | Datura". Pseudonymous founder and CEO of Datura AI Corp. Ecosystem profiles give a first name, "Pierre", no surname, no LinkedIn, no HQ (ownyourmind.ai, Aug 2026: "no published surname, no LinkedIn profile, no disclosed corporate entity").
- **Where from**: not disclosed. Public record: the dominant miner on Subnet 1 in late 2023, running ">120 3090s and 4090s" at ">$100,000 per month" of cost, who then open-sourced his miner and wrote it up (Medium, 11 Apr 2024). Datura's workforce is "distributed across Georgia, Poland, and Spain" (Datura AI LinkedIn); the Desearch founders are in Tbilisi (§4).
- **Built**: a no-ID GPU marketplace where anyone can list a GPU and anyone, human or agent, can rent it per second. Numbers: $964K billed to 1,187 renters in one month, +36% MoM (@lium_io, 9 Sep 2026, https://x.com/lium_io/status/2097824624117473549); a $1,000,000 revenue-funded buyback and burn in one on-chain transaction (extrinsic 9032919-0005, 9 Sep 2026); 1,449 GPUs listed, 1,227 rented (lium.io/api/executors/stats, 17 Sep 2026).
- **Why not a lab or a VC**: not stated. Public record: pseudonymous, no disclosed funding, a miner who became an owner; in Nov 2025 he wrote that "most current users are bittensor miners", i.e. the business was bootstrapped on emissions, not investors.
- **Quotes**:
  - "At the peak, I was utilizing the combined power of over 120 3090s and 4090s, supplemented by an array of CPU machines from AWS. It was a massive undertaking, with operational costs soaring above $100,000 per month." — Medium, 11 Apr 2024, https://medium.com/@surcyf/bittensor-mining-a-deep-dive-e124fa5748c1
  - "I don't know who they are, but the people who are finding SOTA solutions and building SOTA models with SOTA training methods are using subnet 51 for compute." — 13 Oct 2025, https://x.com/fish_datura/status/1977841401728766239
  - "Real businesses on Bittensor work." — 31 Jul 2025, https://x.com/fish_datura/status/1950869953688580316
  - "The masculine urge to buyback + burn $1,000,000.00 worth of my token with our product revenue." — 9 Sep 2026, https://x.com/fish_datura/status/2097814414447481250
- **Critic**: nobody knows who runs the #1 subnet by market cap ($96M) or through what entity; part of the demand is other subnets' miners paying with emissions (he says so himself, 9 Nov 2025, https://x.com/fish_datura/status/1987650746381164883; the split is not disclosed); $964K is billings, not profit; SN51 still receives ~95 TAO a day of emission (7d sample), more than its revenue.
- **Why it stands up**: a pseudonymous ex-miner with no résumé anyone has seen runs the network's biggest real business, and the receipts are on-chain.

### 3. Pierre A. Manseau, KubeTEE (SN90). Score 4/5. Solo builder. In the room on 28 Sep.

- **Who**: @pamanseau; project @KubeTEEAI (140 followers); GitHub `pamanseau`, the only human contributor to `KubeTEE-AI/kubetee-subnet`. Sole owner-operator of SN90 (registered 14 Jul 2026; entity KubeTEE AI LTD, Cyprus). SubnetRadar: "Owned and operated by Pierre". He speaks at Exploit at 14:00 on 28 Sep and sponsors the event's video streaming.
- **Where from**: Montréal. LinkedIn: ran a BBS in 1991; "Sole Owner & CEO - Top Internet, Jan 1992–Jan 1998", one of the first ISPs in Montreal with "plus de 400 clients commerciaux"; later TELUS telecom engineer, CIO roles, internet infrastructure in Morocco; now based in Limassol, Cyprus. Started mining Bittensor in February 2024.
- **Built**: a one-person subnet that turns miners' Kubernetes clusters into a confidential AI factory (Intel TDX/SGX, NVIDIA CC); already serves confidential inference for gm (SN28). Number: 4.25% of pool-injected TAO (~48 TAO/day ≈ $11K/day) in the 7-day sample, with 3 miners and 7 validators.
- **Why not a lab or a VC**: not framed that way. Public record: a 40-year infrastructure veteran with no lab or fund behind him mined for two years, then registered a subnet by himself.
- **Quotes**:
  - "Known as Pierre in the Bittensor community, I have mined since February 2024. I was the first to bring Confidential Computing nodes to Targon (Subnet 4), later helped Chutes (Subnet 64) onboard B200/B300 nodes, and most recently worked with the Lium (Subnet 51) team to deploy Confidential Computing on their stack." — README, https://github.com/KubeTEE-AI/kubetee-subnet
  - "Forty years in infrastructure architecture and deployment at scale. I started in 1986 installing Linux and Novell servers, and in 1992 built one of the first internet providers in Canada." — same README.
  - "Proud to sponsor all video streaming and recording of the event in Montreal" — @KubeTEEAI, 7 Sep 2026, https://x.com/KubeTEEAI/status/2096958753773863353
- **Critic**: a two-month-old, three-miner subnet drawing ~4% of all emission with no disclosed revenue; the owner's second company (1-HORIZON LTD) operates the miners; the team account said it mines SN28 and swaps the gains into SN90 alpha (SubnetRadar SN90); market cap ~$2.7M; solo operator = key-person risk.
- **Why it stands up**: for a Montreal room this is the best face in the file: a man who wired the city to the internet in 1992, mined from a home rig at 60, and now owns a subnet by himself. Say the caveat.

### 4. Giga Chkhikvadze and Mirian Okradze, Desearch (SN22), Datura, Tbilisi. Score 4/5. Outside the US and Europe (Georgia).

- **Who**: Chkhikvadze, co-founder and CEO of Desearch, CTO of Datura AI since Jan 2024 (dev.to: "Tbilisi, Georgia"). Okradze, co-founder and CTO of Desearch (Aug 2024–), software engineer at Datura since Feb 2024 "in Tbilisi, Georgia", still enrolled at Georgian Technical University (BE Computer Science, 2022–2026). Desearch X: @desearch_ai (1.7k).
- **Where from**: Georgia. Chkhikvadze: 20+ years in software; co-founded a Tbilisi dev shop that grew to "more than 50" staff; built a KYC product (Kvalifika) sold to four Georgian banks and an invoicing platform (invoice.ge) bought by TBC Bank; MBA, Akaki Tsereteli State University, Kutaisi. (Ventura Labs podcast ep. 67, 17 Oct 2025; LinkedIn.)
- **Built**: the real-time web/X/Reddit search API that runs as SN22 (one of the original Dec 2023 subnets). Numbers: "Web Search $1.00 per 1,000 searches"; named customers Lium, Chutes, Bitcast, TaoMarketCap (desearch.ai, 17 Sep 2026); ">1.1M searches" served (desearch.ai blog, 2026). Location verified for Desearch (two named founders in Tbilisi; a third Lium contributor lists Tbilisi); not verified for Lium's core code.
- **Why not a lab or a VC**: not stated in those terms. His motive is being shut out of APIs, not raising money:
  - "I started building it because I got tired of running into the same wall: every useful API was either locked down, rate-limited, or too expensive to use at scale. So the idea behind Desearch is pretty simple — make search open again, and let anyone use or improve it." — dev.to, 21 Oct 2025, https://dev.to/chkhikvadze/building-desearch-an-ai-search-api-for-x-twitter-reddit-and-web-lck
  - "One useful way to think about Bittensor decentralization: it is not a binary state. It is an engineering path." — Okradze, LinkedIn, 22 Jun 2026, https://www.linkedin.com/posts/mirian-okradze_bittensor-activity-7474876363615809538-T9vg
  - "Builders should ask practical questions: who runs the subnet code, what is being measured, how often tests run, and whether miner rewards track useful work. That is more important than the story around a subnet." — Okradze, LinkedIn, 29 Jun 2026, https://www.linkedin.com/posts/mirian-okradze_in-bittensor-validators-are-part-of-the-activity-7477397980694642688-NG-h
- **Critic**: SN22 earns ~0% of emission this week (7d sample 0.005%) at a $3.4M market cap while its sister subnet Lium sits at #1; the market has priced the search product near zero; Desearch's LinkedIn shows headcount down about 60% year on year; the group is domiciled in Nevis and its founder is anonymous; revenue undisclosed.
- **Why it stands up**: the cleanest "wrong country" face that is neither Chinese nor anonymous: a fintech founder from Kutaisi and a student from Tbilisi run the search layer that Lium, Chutes and Bitcast buy from. Say out loud that their own subnet earns nothing right now.

### 5. Koyuki Nakamori ("Special K"), Perturb (SN26) and Umi (SN78). Score 4/5

- **Who**: @knakamor (4.0k followers; bio "SN 26/78 | Co-Founder | Advisor | ex-Ava Labs & Opentensor Foundation"). Perturb @perturbaix; Umi @umi_sn78.
- **Where from**: Japanese-born, Canadian. Applied mathematics at UBC and SFU; more than a decade as an AI engineer in San Francisco (first AI hire at Nextdoor and at Headspace, head of AI there); first AI/data hire at Ava Labs; hired by Jacob in 2024 as OTF's head of AI; left; came back as a subnet owner. (TAO Daily, 6 Jun 2026, https://taodaily.io/meet-koyuki-from-applied-math-to-two-bittensor-subnets/)
- **Built**: Perturb pays miners every round to find imperceptible input changes that break production vision models. Umi: sign-language and motion intelligence, first product "bitsign" for Deaf–hearing communication. Numbers: SN78 246 registered miners (17 Sep 2026); both subnets small (SN26 0.11%, SN78 0.26% of emission, 7d).
- **Why not a lab or a VC**: she said so, and named the lab.
  - "I almost got hired by OpenAI, and then I decided to actually join Bittensor around the same time." — as quoted by TAO Daily from the Crypto Millie interview, 10 Jul 2026, https://taodaily.io/ex-ai-engineer-turned-down-openai-to-build-on-bittensor/
  - "By now we know those people are not to be trusted. Would you trust Sam Altman? Would you trust Dario? The answer is no." — same source.
  - "OpenAI with @elonmusk's original vision was about decentralization/open source AI but somehow derailed to become diametrically opposite of its original vision / Now Bittensor is the best bet to achieve this" — 13 Jun 2026, https://x.com/knakamor/status/2065809837183865150 (line break shown as "/")
  - "Now I'm back, and now I'm owning two subnets, and the community is a lot bigger. The flywheel has kicked in. I see a huge opportunity." — TAO Daily, 6 Jun 2026.
- **Critic**: she was OTF's head of AI, hired by Jacob personally, so it reads as an insider story; SN78 pivoted from voice to "Universal Motion Intelligence" in Aug 2026 and the alpha "ran 250%" on the announcement (TAO Daily); no disclosed revenue; the OpenAI claim is her own account. Disclose the OTF history if you use her.
- **Why it stands up**: a Canadian applied mathematician who says on the record that she picked Bittensor over an OpenAI offer.

### 6. Will and Tom Blears, Bitcast (SN93). Score 4/5

- **Who**: brothers Will Blears (@will_mizu, co-founder and CTO) and Tom Blears (@Tom_dot_b, CEO). Project @Bitcast_network (3.8k).
- **Where from**: United Kingdom. Tom: University of Sheffield; Lloyds, Deloitte, UK banking IT; built an e-commerce business and a 70K-follower audience. Will: computer-science graduate, "aerospace weapons systems" then "low-latency trading platforms"; met Fish (§2) while a digital nomad in South America in early 2024, joined Tensora as first employee, mined "more than ten Bittensor subnets", went solo, then founded Bitcast. (Bitcast threads 17 and 24 Jul 2026; LinkedIn.)
- **Built**: brands post briefs; YouTube and X creators are the miners and are paid for verified watch time. Numbers: Q2 2026 revenue $105,499 vs $101,841 paid to miners, the first subnet to out-earn its miner emissions in a quarter (SubConnect, Aug 2026); $435.2K cumulative revenue, $261.8K buybacks, 1.2K creators (stats.bitcast.network, 17 Sep 2026).
- **Why not a lab or a VC**: they said so.
  - "Several incubators questioned whether the idea belonged within Bittensor because it was not building AI in the traditional sense. Tom and Will believed its incentive model could coordinate far more than AI alone, so they bootstrapped the company and launched Bitcast." — @Bitcast_network, 24 Jul 2026, https://x.com/Bitcast_network/status/2080669340710670382
  - "In early 2024, while travelling through South America as a digital nomad, Will met Fish, founder of https://t.co/VTiQtWDht3 (Subnet 51). Fish introduced him to TAO and Bittensor." — 17 Jul 2026, https://x.com/Bitcast_network/status/2078147720112480413
  - Will: "Our first revenue came from the bittensor eco. / Now our biggest clients are in prediction markets (followed by perp DEXs). / We've crossed the chasm." — 29 Aug 2026, https://x.com/will_mizu/status/2093694909433729119
  - Will: "See you in Montreal bittensor fam! 🇨🇦" — 30 Jul 2026, https://x.com/will_mizu/status/2082844377701834928
- **Critic**: the dollars are small (~$65K a month) next to a ~$20M market cap and ~26 TAO/day of emission; the Jan 2026 "$630k" burn was emission-funded owner alpha, not revenue (https://x.com/Bitcast_network/status/2008609007917810123); customers are mostly crypto projects; it is marketing, not AI, which is what the incubators said.
- **Why it stands up**: "the incubators said no, so we bootstrapped on Bittensor", plus the only revenue-over-emissions quarter on the network; Will met Fish in a hostel and will be in Montreal.

### 7. Vincent Rapido, individual miner (SN27), then Miners Union and TaoSwap. Score 4/5. A miner, not an owner.

- **Who**: @Rapido_ai; GitHub `Rapiiidooo`, Paris. Bio: "Bittensor addict. Co-founder & Builder. @tao_minersunion × @taoswap_org". Never owned a subnet.
- **Where from**: France. A full-stack developer who arrived in late 2023 believing Bittensor was "a scam, a Ponzi" because miners had to buy TAO to register; mined SN27 because it was the cheapest to enter; spent his Christmas holiday writing a proof-of-work check to stop a miner faking "9 billion fake GPUs and 9 petabytes of RAM", and won a 50 TAO bounty; met his co-founders in the SN27 miner Discord. (TAO Daily write-up of the Ventura Labs interview, 28 Jul 2026, https://taodaily.io/vincent-rapidos-journey-from-skepticism-to-contributing-on-bittensor/)
- **Why not a lab or a VC**: he said so.
  - "It's the only place a random retail with a 9/5 job can actually outperform and show case to the world he can beat an incorporated team." — 1 May 2026, https://x.com/Rapido_ai/status/2050234781992927716
  - "As a miner & validator on Bittensor, I see a lot of people who'd belong in that room but would never nominate themselves." — 22 Apr 2026, https://x.com/Rapido_ai/status/2047011340334625091
  - "All of this permissionless. / Anybody could have taken the subnets slots after the leave of previous sn owners." — 14 Aug 2026, on SN3, SN39 and SN81 changing hands by holder vote, https://x.com/Rapido_ai/status/2088278350817067044
- **Critic**: he now runs a validator and a trading front end, so he has a stake in the price; his posts are combative (aimed at Covenant's Sam Dare, 14 Aug 2026); the bounty story is his own telling on a friendly podcast; he is in the EU.
- **Why it stands up**: the best single sentence in the file for the theme, from someone who never owned a subnet and started by calling the thing a Ponzi.

### 8. Ning Ren, Engy (SN53), Hanlin AI. Score 4/5

- **Who**: @totheagi (4.3k; bio "Building agent empire. ex google brain (tensorflow, TPU), Fudan CS."); GitHub `renning22`. Co-founder, Hanlin AI (San Francisco). Owner of SN53 Engy and SN11 TrajectoryRL.
- **Where from**: born and educated in China (BSc CS, Fudan; co-founded and exited a Shanghai gaming startup 2009–2011); Microsoft; Google Brain (TensorFlow/JAX XLA performance on TPU/GPU); Pony.ai AI-infra tech lead ("training systems across 1,000 GPUs"); then Hanlin AI. (LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/renning22)
- **Built**: a pay-per-token API serving frontier open models on gaming GPUs with a cryptographic fingerprint on every answer. Numbers: Kimi K3, 2.8T parameters, on 80× RTX 5090 (27 Jul 2026, ~1M views); permissionless mining opened with "30 clusters 94 machines 420 GPUs 17.6 TB aggregate VRAM" (25 Jul 2026); epoch 13 (9–16 Sep 2026): 77 miners, 3,806,357 requests, 66.5B tokens, $12,726 settled (provider.engy.ai public ledger, fetched 17 Sep 2026).
- **Why not a lab or a VC**: not stated. Public record: he took over a dead subnet slot (zero emissions from 21 Jan 2026) with no application; no disclosed funding; his framing is that the labs' hardware moat is now optional.
  - "The most powerful open model on Earth, on the most abundant GPUs on Earth. Any lab, startup, or university can now own it, probe it, fine-tune it, run agents on it." — 27 Jul 2026, https://x.com/totheagi/status/2081855316443205717
  - "A first for open weights: frontier intelligence served with zero HBM, the scarcest silicon in AI. Just GDDR7 gaming cards, plain ethernet, and the official MXFP4 weights, nothing requantized." — same post.
  - "Engy opened permissionless inference mining on Bittensor SN53. Thank you to every early-bird miner who plugged in." — 25 Jul 2026, https://x.com/totheagi/status/2080925107569185098
- **Critic**: an ex-Google, ex-Pony.ai engineer in San Francisco is exactly who a lab would hire, so he fits "chose the open route", not "had no other door"; one owner-run "master validator" does all GPU verification (~49.5% of validator stake in July); self-mining accusations in Discord answered only with a denial; no slashing shipped; ~$1.8K/day settled against ~26 TAO/day of emission.
- **Why it stands up**: the best "gaming cards beat the labs" demo on the network; tell it as "a Google Brain engineer took a dead slot nobody wanted".

### 9. The Affine Foundation team, Affine (SN120). Score 3/5. Pseudonymous; China.

- **Who**: three pseudonymous leads, "Tobias, Allan, and bignickeye", operating as the Affine Foundation (@affine_io, 2.5k). Jacob founded the subnet (Jul 2025) and handed "core ownership" to them in June 2026; he is chief scientist.
- **Where from**: China. Jacob's Discord post, June 2026 (relayed by taoprotocol.org): "It is with confidence that I am ready to release the core ownership to the team in China, with the three titan leaders: Tobias, Allan, and bignickeye." — https://taoprotocol.org/affine-sn120-update-model-migration-and-an-evaluation-bug/ . Invited by Alibaba to speak at the first Qwen Conference, Singapore, 26 May 2026 (https://x.com/affine_io/status/2058546037632159896). Nothing else about the three is public.
- **Built**: an open post-training arena: anyone fine-tunes Qwen3.6-35B-A3B, duels the reigning king, and the winner takes one of five paid slots; weights published. Number: "each slot pays roughly $50,000 USD per week" (@affine_io, 23 Aug 2026, https://x.com/affine_io/status/2091498650119901215); 5.6% of pool-injected TAO (7d).
- **Quotes**: "We think the best Affine miner probably hasn't heard of Bittensor yet." and "You don't need prior Bittensor experience, an application, or anyone's approval to compete." — same 23 Aug post. "One side effect of putting real money behind an AI evaluator is that the evaluator itself becomes an optimization target." — 27 Aug 2026, https://x.com/affine_io/status/2093008057261609231
- **Critic**: Jacob's own subnet, so self-referential on stage; ~$86K/day of emission to 1–5 anonymous wallets; the scorer was gamed at least twice and the throne reset (27 Aug 2026); kings found to be copies (Jul 2026); no customers; Jacob wrote (20 Dec 2025) he considered turning emissions off over "self play" insinuations; the repo has an operator `mining/` folder (see affine-neurips-factcheck.md).
- **Why it stands up**: "wrong country, anonymous, no permission", and a Chinese team invited on stage by Alibaba. Weak because nothing about the people is public.

### 10. Fred Esere and the Polaris Cloud team, formerly SN49 (deregistered 1 Nov 2025). Score 3/5. Outside the US and Europe (Kampala, Nairobi); an honest loss.

- **Who**: Fred Esere (founder; Florida LLC filed 8 Sep 2025), X @polariscloudai (567 followers; location "Florida · London · Nairobi"). Engineers on GitHub: Tobius Saul (Kampala), Mubarak Banadda (Kampala, Makerere AI Research Lab), Gyagenda Moshin (Kampala), Ashtone Onyango (Nairobi), Mason Hargrove (San Francisco).
- **Where from**: via TAO Daily: "Most of the team comes from Africa, where many talented builders face a simple barrier, lack of access to compute." Workforce "distributed across 6 countries (including Nigeria, Uganda, Ethiopia, United States, and Zambia)" (LinkedIn). Esere: UK product career (Auto Trader, BBC), then Senior Product Manager at Microsoft (2021–Aug 2025), Orlando; ran Polaris as a side project, "bootstrapped team of four full-time engineers".
- **Built, and lost**: a GPU marketplace aimed at African universities and students, "RTX 3090s & A6000s at just $0.25/hr" (12 Jun 2025). Timeline: validator repo 9 Jan 2025; Revenue Search podcast ep. 23, 26 Aug 2025 ("From bootstrapping with loaned GPUs to pitching a $1M raise"); dereg candidate 23 Oct 2025; 90% reward burn 28–29 Oct; **deregistered 1 Nov 2025 when Nepher AI burned 287.992 TAO (~$139,000) to take slot 49** (TAO Daily, 1 Nov 2025). Now: Polaris Computer, Cathedral (TDX sandboxes), and a `bigailabs` org mining Teutonic SN3.
- **Quotes**:
  - "Polaris is no longer on the Bittensor Network. / Re-entry is our top priority. / Our commitment to delivering lasting value on the world's most powerful incentive mechanism remains unwavering." — 2 Nov 2025, https://x.com/polariscloudai/status/1984931734404608017
  - "A globally connected network where anyone with spare GPU power can list and earn, while anyone, anywhere in the world can access affordable, on-demand compute, applications and more." — 29 Oct 2025, https://x.com/polariscloudai/status/1983624149856874910
  - "Everyone's talking about decentralized AI compute on Bittensor. / But only one platform delivers RTX 3090s & A6000s at just $0.25/hr." — 12 Jun 2025, https://x.com/polariscloudai/status/1933178405912031422
  - "Grateful for every miner, validator, and the Bittensor team who have built something wonderful." — 2 Nov 2025.
- **Critic**: failed on the chain's own metric in a compute market Lium already owned; the founder is a Microsoft PM in Florida, so the "Africa" is the engineers, not the face; the post-dereg pivot into mining other subnets is what a critic calls emission farming. Sources: https://taodaily.io/bittensor-subnet-49-takeover-polaris-deregistered-nepher-ai-assumes-ownership/ ; https://taodaily.io/polaris-responds-to-deregistration-with-a-new-path-forward/
- **Why it stands up**: it shows permissionless entry and permissionless exit in one story. The door was open; a Kampala and Nairobi team walked in with loaned GPUs, ran a live marketplace for six months, and lost the slot to someone who paid $139K for it. Jacob can say the second half because they said it first.

### 11. Thanh Luan Tran ("toilaluan"), NicheImage (SN23, 2023–24) and Condenses (SN47, 2024–25), Hanoi. Score 3/5. Outside the US and Europe.

- **Who**: GitHub `toilaluan` (Hanoi, 105 public repos); LinkedIn "Thanh Luan Tran – Bittensor", Hanoi. No X voice (@toilaluan resolves with 0 posts). Lead engineer of SN23 NicheImage as "Head of Decentralized AI" at ZenAI (Hanoi); then founder of Condenses (SN47) "in a collaboration with Taostats Validator".
- **Where from**: undergraduate at Hanoi University of Science and Technology, Oct 2020–May 2024. His first NicheImage commits are dated 6 Dec 2023 and the launch post 7 Feb 2024, three months before he graduated.
- **Built**: the image-generation engine of SN23, one side of the first-ever subnet merger on Bittensor (NicheTensor + SocialTensor, 4 Jun 2024); then SN47 Condense AI (prompt compression, Nov 2024). Numbers: 82 of the SocialTensorSubnet repo's commits are his, the most of any contributor (ahead of `unconst`, 36); 71 of 81 commits on `condenses/neural-condense-subnet` (GitHub API, 17 Sep 2026).
- **Quotes**:
  - "For several months, we've proudly owned and developed NicheImage, Subnet 23 on the Bittensor Network - Opentensor Foundation." — LinkedIn, 7 Feb 2024, https://www.linkedin.com/posts/toilaluan_as-the-year-draws-to-a-close-im-excited-activity-7160811315815473152-ItnR
  - "My name is Luan, and I'm Vietnamese." and "After resigned from ZenAI, I once tried launching a startup focused on decentralized LLM accerleration 🚀, in a collaboration with Taostats Validator. Though it didn't ultimately succeed but I learnt a lot." — GitHub profile README, https://github.com/toilaluan
- **Critic**: neither subnet survived in his hands; SN47 went quiet after Feb 2025; he has never spoken publicly beyond a README; "career transition" is a polite phrase for out of work. (Note: his 93 commits in the RedTeam SN61 repo are inherited NicheImage history; he is not a RedTeam engineer.)
- **Why it stands up**: hard GitHub evidence that a student in Hanoi ran a live subnet before he had a degree, with no capital and no permission. Tell it in the third person.

### 12. Dendrite and "@Wejh69", Conjectures (SN66), Teutonic (SN3), Albedo (SN97), SOMA (SN114). Score 3/5. Pseudonymous studio.

- **Who**: Dendrite (@DendriteHQ, 620 followers; dendrite.holdings; GitHub `DendriteHQ`, `unarbos`; Hugging Face `dendriteholdings`). Bio: "Owner: SN114 @SomaSubnet. Co-builders: SN3 Teutonic, SN66 Conjectures, SN97 Albedo. Mining: many." No named founders or executives. The Conjectures direction is credited to a pseudonymous account, @Wejh69 (not resolvable on 17 Sep 2026).
- **Where from**: not disclosed; site claims "a team of 50+ elite engineers and mathematicians"; present at Proof of Talk, Paris (Jun 2026); probably Europe-based. Also runs SimplyTao.
- **Built**: rebuilt Conjectures into a Lean-verified math-bounty market in ten days and, five weeks later, paid for the near-half-density case of Green's Problem 51, open for 16 years (@conjectures_io, 9 Sep 2026, https://x.com/conjectures_io/status/2097747177606967570); co-builds Teutonic ("70 days. 2,163 duels. 203 coronations.", 18 Aug 2026) and Albedo.
- **Quotes**:
  - "July 26 @Wejh69 gave sn66 the direction bittensor was missing. turn emissions into machine-verified progress on open mathematical conjectures / 10 days later the dendrite team with @Wejh69 rebuilt the subnet around it and shipped it to mainnet" — 5 Aug 2026, https://x.com/DendriteHQ/status/2085073443524084165
  - "One rule above all: max transparency. / One public key. Every method documented. Everything verifiable." — 10 Jul 2026, https://x.com/DendriteHQ/status/2075615123935474135
  - "We support transparent self-mining too. / That's how we build SN3 and SN97." — 30 Jul 2026, https://x.com/DendriteHQ/status/2082844753344000075
- **Critic**: an anonymous company that co-builds Jacob's subnets and mines them; Albedo removed its own 20% miner allocation after criticism and had its eval machine compromised (Jul 2026); Teutonic-I's benchmark claim is contested by Templar's audit (weights ~96% correlated with Qwen3.5-9B-Base); Conjectures sits near the deregistration floor and pays bounties by hand from a 2-of-3 multisig.
- **Why it stands up**: one line: "an anonymous account posted an idea on July 26; it was live on mainnet August 6 and paid for a 16-year-old open problem five weeks later." Risky as a full story.

### Read-aloud, anonymous voice: "@hodler0_"

- "From a full time Front end engineer to bittensor maxi in 2023 / I left my job in 2023 and had no real backup or funds / Just went all into tao having faith in it and in god / I worked my ass of for 14 hours a day / Mined subnets like crazy" — 10 May 2026, https://x.com/hodler0_/status/2053396132294983973 (1,144 followers; account since 2013; unverifiable; the same post describes burnout and "Crippling anxiety"). Use as "an anonymous miner wrote", not as a face.

### Checked and set aside

- **Shardul Bansal and Seth Schilbe, Oro (SN15), Vancouver**: two Canadians paid "1,206 unique miners" "$200,000+" in 36 days (20 May 2026) and "$1M in cumulative payouts" by 4 Aug 2026 (https://x.com/shardiban/status/2084714798944752108); first live-token startup admitted to Y Combinator (8 Sep 2026). Set aside as a lead face because Oro is VC-backed from the start (Crucible Labs, Unsupervised Capital), has no customers, and lost ~$630K to a wallet hack (13 Jul 2026). Good as "the establishment came to us" for a Montreal room.
- **Max Sebti, Score (SN44)**: photographer → hCaptcha spinoff → CrunchDAO → PwC France buying miner-trained vision models (15 Apr 2026). Set aside because DCG/Yuma registered the slot, a listed company invested $1M, and the chairman is an ex-Goldman partner; no verbatim first-person quote in text form.
- **"Barbarian", MANTIS (SN123) and Refinery (SN125)**: one pseudonymous coder authored 202 of 204 and 13 of 13 commits; first revenue burn "roughly $5896.80 USD" (30 May 2026, https://x.com/Barbarian7676/status/2060715812621811933). Set aside because both subnets earn ~0% emission and the "revenue" is his own trading.
- **Mark Jeffrey**: mines via an OpenClaw agent for "about 30 bucks per day" (TWiST, 12 Mar 2026); fund partner and podcaster. One-liner only: "There is no 'job'. / Mining > Hiring." (30 Aug 2026, https://x.com/markjeffrey/status/2094211007665279334).
- **RedTeam (SN61)**: London company, $4M seed (AlbionVC, DCG); "seven-figure annualized revenue" (TAO Daily, 11 Aug 2026). Engineers are Uzbek developers in South Korea. VC-funded, so a poor fit. **Hippius (SN75)**: co-founded by the Taostats founder; insider. **Tensorplex / Dojo (SN52)**: Singapore, VC-funded, operations suspended Dec 2025. **Minos (SN107)**: largest emission earner this week, fully pseudonymous, no founder statement found; too thin.
- **Named Affine miners**: none found telling their story; the "$50,000 a week" per slot remains the team's figure.

---
## Deliverable 3. Bottom-up governance: dynamic TAO in plain language

### 3.1 The idea in five sentences

Every twelve seconds the chain mints half a TAO. It has to decide which of 128 markets gets it. Before February 2025, 64 large validators voted on that split. Since dTAO, the split follows a price: every subnet has its own token (alpha), you "vote" for a subnet by swapping TAO for its alpha and holding it, that buying raises the alpha's price, and the chain pays new TAO to subnets in proportion to a moving average of that price. So the people who hold TAO, not a committee, say which markets should exist and how well they should be paid, and they say it with money they can lose.

### 3.2 The rule in force today (17 Sep 2026), one step at a time

Terms: **EMA** = exponential moving average, a smoothed price that reacts slowly (the smoothing window is about four weeks, so a one-day pump barely moves it). **Miner burn** = the share of a subnet's miner rewards that went to the owner's own hotkeys last tempo. **Gate** = a curve that cuts small shares toward zero. **root_prop** = the share of a subnet that "belongs" to TAO stakers on root, computed as root TAO × 0.18 ÷ (root TAO × 0.18 + that subnet's alpha issued).

1. For each subnet, take the EMA of its alpha price in TAO, capped at 1.0.
2. Multiply by (1 − miner burn). A subnet whose miner rewards all flow back to its owner gets nothing (Actual SN95 and the "deprecated" SN39 slot are at 100% burn and receive zero, on-chain `MinerBurned`, 17 Sep 2026).
3. Divide by the sum over all emission-enabled subnets. That is the ungated share.
4. Find the 32nd-largest share (theta). Multiply each share by share³ ÷ (share³ + theta³). A subnet at rank 32 keeps half; rank 20 keeps almost all; rank 60 keeps almost nothing. Re-normalise.
5. Pay each subnet its share of the block's 0.5 TAO. Inside the subnet, the alpha minted alongside it is split 18% owner, 41% miners, 41% validators and their stakers, with root_prop of the validator half reserved for root stakers.

Sources: bittensor.com/docs/concepts/emissions (snapshot 11 Aug 2026); live code `subnet_emissions.rs` (opentensor/subtensor, fetched 17 Sep 2026); on-chain hyperparameters at block 9,087,840: `EmissionBarRank = 32`, `EmissionGateExponent = 3`, `TaoWeight ≈ 0.18`, `SubnetOwnerCut = 11796/65535 ≈ 18%`.

Where the TAO physically goes, because it matters for reading trackers: only part of a subnet's TAO share is injected into its pool as liquidity (capped at root_prop × alpha emission × price). The rest is used by the chain to buy that subnet's alpha in its own pool and hold it as protocol-owned alpha ("chain buys"). On 17 Sep 2026 about 1,140–1,270 TAO a day was injected and about 2,300–2,400 TAO a day was chain-bought; nothing is paid to root in TAO (root dividends are alpha) and nothing is left unissued. This is why the directly measured "injected TAO" series over-states young subnets (high root_prop) and under-states old ones: Minos takes 11% of injected TAO but about 6.7% of gross emission; Lium takes 8.4% injected but about 11.9% gross. Quote the gross figure.

### 3.3 Five rules in nineteen months (say this before a critic does)

| When | Rule | What it rewarded |
|---|---|---|
| 13–14 Feb 2025, dTAO launch (block 4,920,351) | share ∝ EMA alpha price | price, i.e. stake conviction |
| ~Nov 2025 → 22 Jun 2026, "TaoFlow" (runtimes v334–v411) | share ∝ EMA of net TAO flow (buys minus sells) | fresh inflow; punished any subnet with net selling |
| 22–25 Jun 2026 (PR #2781; runtimes 421–423) | back to EMA price, plus a miner-burn factor | price again; owners paying themselves are cut |
| Jul 2026, V440 "Emission Gate" | price through a threshold gate; the gate's selection rule itself changed twice (q = 0.61 → q = 0.75 → rank 32) | the top ~30 subnets; "an idle slot is worth approximately nothing" (V440) |
| Jul–Sep 2026, V441 Root Reborn, V447, V448, V450 (V461 on testnet) | root dividends held as alpha in validator-curated baskets; ownership takeover at 18% conviction; 1/16 basket cap | validators as fund managers; lock-weighted ownership votes |

Sources: bittensor.com/releases (V440, V441, V447, V448, V450, V461); taodaily.io "How Bittensor rebuilt its core economics across three releases" (29 Jun 2026); ownyourmind.ai "How dTAO actually works" (2026); neuralteq.com/bittensor-emission-gate (snapshot 29 Jul 2026). CONFLICT on dating: the project notes say "June 2026, spec 440"; the release page lists V440 under July and the price-return under 22–25 June (specs 421–423). Say "June and July 2026".

### 3.4 The numbers

**How emission is distributed today (17 Sep 2026).**
- Gross share, modelled from on-chain EMA prices at block 9,088,085: Lium 11.9%, Chutes 9.1%, Targon 7.2%, Minos 6.7%, Affine 6.4%, Score 4.7%, Teutonic 3.9%, Engy 3.6%, ORO 3.5%, Vanta 3.5%. **Top 10 = 60.6%.** 41 subnets above 0.1%; 59 below 0.01%; 3 emission-disabled (SN29, SN35, SN36). Without the gate the same prices would give the top 10 about 40–46%; the gate adds 15–20 points of concentration.
- Directly measured TAO injected into pools, 43 samples over 10–17 Sep 2026 (block 9,087,756): top 10 = 54.7%; 55 subnets above 0.1%; 35 at zero.
- Corroboration: Neuralteq's 29 Jul 2026 snapshot showed the gate lifting Chutes 10.33% → 13.25% and Lium 7.85% → 10.06% while rank-54 ItsAI fell 0.43% → 0.04%. V440's own text: "Below-bar emission (94 subnets)" of 126. TAO Protocol's headline on 23 Jun 2026: "Bittensor Stopped Paying 57 Subnets". SubnetRadar (17 Sep 2026) ranks Minos #4 and Affine #5 by emission, matching the model. CONFLICT: bittensor.ai shows Score at 2.49% (#7) the same day; trackers use different denominators.
- Emission per day: 3,555 TAO issued in the 24 hours to block 9,087,756 (on-chain), about $802K at $225.60; about $293M a year. (A one-off 172,001 TAO mint at block 9,075,799 on 15 Sep 2026, a runtime-459 accounting migration for the root pot, inflates any multi-day window that spans it. Do not use a 7-day issuance delta.)

**Root vs subnets.** On-chain at block 9,087,840: total issuance 11,523,171 TAO; root stake 5,471,956 TAO (47.5% of all TAO); TAO in subnet pools 2,008,106 (17.4%); total alpha market cap 5.66M TAO at spot, about $1.10B by taostats' definition. Root dividends: "roughly 936 τ every day ($222k/day) — 26% of all new emission — and have paid 837,536 τ ($198M) since dTAO went live" (V441 release, 24 Jul 2026); recomputed on 17 Sep 2026 at about 765 TAO-equivalent a day (21%), now accruing as alpha in baskets rather than sold ("At launch every fund runs the null strategy: the dividend is not sold at all", V441).

**How much has shifted since dTAO launched.** Measured on-chain (`SubnetTAO` per netuid, `TotalIssuance`, archive node, 17 Sep 2026):

| Date (block) | Issuance TAO | Root TAO | Root share of all TAO | TAO in subnet pools | Subnets | Alpha market cap (TAO) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 13 Feb 2025 (4,920,351, first dTAO block) | 8,372,055 | 5,864,261 | 70.0% | 45 | 64 | ~0 |
| 21 Apr 2025 (5,400,000) | 8,641,391 | 5,691,313 | 65.9% | 522,876 | 94 | 1,578,508 |
| 15 Jul 2025 (6,000,000) | 9,417,626 | 6,113,131 | 64.9% | 874,623 | 128 | 1,973,817 |
| 6 Oct 2025 (6,600,000) | 10,029,284 | 5,960,195 | 59.4% | 1,287,544 | 128 | 2,640,085 |
| 15 Dec 2025 (7,103,976, first halving) | 10,500,001 | 5,654,550 | 53.9% | 1,719,402 | 128 | 3,458,821 |
| 8 Mar 2026 (7,700,000) | 10,743,473 | 5,294,681 | 49.3% | 2,010,874 | 128 | 4,774,071 |
| 30 May 2026 (8,300,000) | 10,962,866 | 5,301,479 | 48.4% | 2,000,137 | 128 | 4,931,463 |
| 18 Aug 2026 (8,900,000) | 11,259,398 | 5,365,646 | 47.7% | 2,027,903 | 128 | 5,600,569 |
| 17 Sep 2026 (9,087,756) | 11,523,130 | 5,471,974 | 47.5% | 2,007,889 | 128 | 4,874,337 (taostats def.) / 5,658,657 (spot) |

Reading it plainly: on the day dTAO went live, 70% of every TAO in existence sat on root, choosing nothing, and 64 subnets existed. Nineteen months later, 47.5% sits on root and about 2.0 million TAO (17% of supply, about $453M at $225.60) has been placed by holders into the pools of specific subnets, across 128 slots. The move happened in the first thirteen months and has been flat at ~2.0M TAO since March 2026: alpha market cap kept rising because prices rose, not because more TAO came in. Absolute root TAO barely changed (5.86M → 5.47M); most of the shift is new issuance going to subnets. FalconX (May 2026): "adoption appears to be growing slower than expected." Before dTAO (on-chain `EmissionValues`, block 4,750,000, 21 Jan 2025) the 64 root validators' vote gave the top 10 subnets 44.0% (SN19 7.6%, SN4 7.4%, SN51 5.0%, SN1 4.9%, SN29 4.0%, ...) and no subnet got zero; today the top 10 get ~61% and about 35 get nothing measurable. dTAO plus the gate made the split more concentrated, by design.

**Subnets that rose on stake.**
- Lium SN51: #3 by voted emission in Jan 2025 (5.0%); #1 by market cap and by emission on 17 Sep 2026 after "$964,000 billed to 1,187 renters" and a $1M revenue-funded burn (TAO Daily, 10 Sep 2026).
- Engy SN53: took a slot whose emissions had been zero since 21 Jan 2026; public launch 21 Jul 2026; emissions back on 23 Jul; "30d performance +349.8 percent" (SubnetRadar, 25 Jul 2026); #8 by emission on 17 Sep 2026.
- Minos SN107: registered 2 Feb 2026 (on-chain `NetworkRegisteredAt`; SubnetRadar says March, CONFLICT); 7.61% of demand by 29 Jul 2026 (Neuralteq); #4 by emission on 17 Sep 2026 at a $19M market cap, the clearest case of price outrunning size.
- Affine SN120: registered 10 Jun 2025 (on-chain); #5 by emission and #5–6 by market cap on 17 Sep 2026, funded entirely by holders since it sells nothing.
- Teutonic SN3: "Today, after 4 months, Subnet 3 (previously @tplr_ai) got retaken by holders through vote." (@const_reborn, 14 Aug 2026). Nuance: that vote used the Conviction ownership mechanism (single-hotkey locked alpha above 18% of eligible supply, V447), a lock-weighted vote of alpha holders, not the emission market itself.
- Chutes SN64, Targon SN4, Score SN44: top-10 by emission both in Jan 2025 (Targon, Lium) and today; Chutes was the single biggest winner of the gate (10.33% → 13.25%, Neuralteq, 29 Jul 2026).

**Subnets that fell on stake.**
- Templar SN3 under Covenant: Covenant AI left on 9–10 Apr 2026; "Templar, Covenant's flagship subnet, dropped by more than 50%" and Covenant "sold approximately 37,000 TAO worth of alpha tokens while leaving" (tao.media, 14 May 2026). CONFLICT: earlier project notes say −55 to −63% from tracker snapshots; tao.media says ">50%".
- EfficientFrontier SN53: emissions decayed through 2025 and reached zero on 21 Jan 2026; the slot sat dead for six months until Engy took it (SubnetRadar, 25 Jul 2026).
- Ridges SN62: a top-10 subnet in 2025; on 17 Sep 2026 about 1.0% gross share (rank 26), alpha down ~61% over 90 days (SubnetRadar), 30-day net flow negative (taoflows.app). Under TaoFlow a net-negative flow meant near-zero emission; Jacob noted it publicly on 20 Jan 2026.
- Polaris Cloud SN49: deregistered 1 Nov 2025 for sustained low emission; Nepher AI burned 287.992 TAO (~$139,000) to take the slot (TAO Daily, 1 Nov 2025).
- SN28 "LOL"/meme subnet, Feb 2025: an anonymous owner turned SN28 into a memecoin subnet that reached the 7th-largest market cap; the Opentensor Foundation "used its root stake to run custom validator code, incentivizing people to sell SN28 tokens, causing their price to plummet 98% in a few hours" (PANews, Mar 2025). The same slot is gm today. Say this one yourself: it is the clearest case of the foundation, not the market, deciding.
- The gate's own count: 94 of 126 subnets were below the bar when V440 shipped (Jul 2026); 57 stopped being paid in the June switch (TAO Protocol, 23 Jun 2026).

### 3.5 The honest critiques (with the defence next to each)

1. **Concentration of stake.** arXiv 2507.02951 (data to 12 Feb 2025, pre-dTAO): "the richest percentile of wallets controls between roughly 38 % and nearly 100 % of total stake, with a median of 90 %... Gini ≈ 0.98"; "many subnets can be trivially compromised by coalitions of just 1–2% of participants." Top 10 root validators about 56.5% of stake, the largest (tao.bot) 16.7% (taostats via Our Crypto Talk, 16 Jun 2026); the project notes cite ~65% for the top 10 (Yellow.com, Apr 2026), CONFLICT by date and method. ownyourmind.ai (2026): "Templar (SN3) 95.6% one coldkey, Targon (SN4) 88.3%, plus an owner-self-capture cluster (6 subnets with owner holding 51-77% of their own alpha)". Defence (Jacob's corrected core, 14 Sep): concentration of producers and stakers is acceptable if entry is open and the rules are the same for all, as with Bitcoin mining pools; the moral claim is rules, not distribution.
2. **Speculation.** Price is a noisy signal for usefulness. PANews (Mar 2025): "the highest priced tokens in the crypto market are often those with the most attention, hype, Ponzi characteristics, and marketing resources"; the SN28 memecoin was the proof. Engy's alpha ran +350% in 30 days before it had a product to price. Emission (~$293M/yr) against $15–35M of external revenue is a 10–20× gap (this file; SubConnect; Sawinyh). Defence: the EMA window (about four weeks), the gate, and deregistration of the lowest-priced slot make hype expensive to sustain; the market removed Polaris, EfficientFrontier and the meme slot; 14 teams now buy back their token with revenue.
3. **Root stake.** Root TAO earns a slice of every subnet without choosing one, 26% of emission in Jul 2026 (V441). Jacob's own Root Reborn text: "The rate that's supposed to anchor the network is funded by continuously dumping the very assets that give TAO its value" (tao.media, 16 Jun 2026). Yuma (DCG's validator) opposed it: "In its current form, the Root Reborn proposal carries substantial unmitigated risk that outweighs its benefits" (crypto.news; TAO Daily, 20 Jun 2026; the project notes say 19 Jun). It shipped anyway (V441 Jul, V450 Aug). Defence: root yield is now held as alpha in curated baskets, so passive TAO no longer sells subnet tokens every day; V461 (testnet) turns baskets into tradable positions.
4. **Rule churn.** Three allocation models in 16 months, the gate's selection rule changed twice in eight weeks, root yield mechanics changed three times in three months. Yuma asked for "a roadmap of planned chain upgrades, a defined release process, and an impact matrix" (TAO Daily, 20 Jun 2026). Zipcode/Instant SN46 pivoted its whole business on the June change. Defence: none that satisfies a builder; the honest line is that the rules are being tuned in public, on-chain, and that the ossification date (project-context) is when tuning stops.
5. **Owner self-dealing and circularity.** Owners take 18% of alpha and can buy their own token in a thin pool to lift the EMA. Countermeasures now in the rule: the miner-burn factor (owner-directed miner rewards cut the share; Actual SN95 sits at 100% burn and zero emission), and the 18% conviction threshold for ownership. Circularity: Affine miners buy Lium GPUs and Chutes inference with emissions; KubeTEE mines gm and buys its own alpha; Blockmachine sells RPC mainly to Taostats, a related party. Jacob's defence (29 Nov 2025): "Miner sell pressure is just buy pressure on Bittensor itself."
6. **Founder influence.** Root Reborn, Teutonic and Affine are Jacob-authored or Jacob-led; he sold alpha on Covenant subnets during the dispute ("less than 1%" of what he had invested); privileged operations run through a sudo multisig of Rao Foundation keys; the emission formula changed five times in 2026 by that key. A critic's line (Sawinyh, 2026, presented as a claim): "the effective mover on 38 of 41 network upgrades between 2023 and 2026". Defence: Jacob's own June 2026 roadmap targets full decentralization around December 2027, and the project's pivot line is that the key must go and the date must be public.

What defenders say, verbatim: Jacob on This Week in Startups (17 Aug 2026): "if we optimize for all those projects to produce a value, which is measured by their price, we can actually elicit the internal machinery of capitalism, which is thousands of individuals from DGens to scientists and the like to long-term investors, we can elicit all of that swarm intelligence to properly order rank these projects" (castro.fm/episode/iZBeag). The dTAO whitepaper's stated aim: to "eliminate the apathetic oligarchic voting system" of 64 root validators. Note: a verbatim "the market decides" tweet from @const_reborn was not found; that phrase is tao.media's paraphrase (21 Aug 2026).

### 3.6 Compared with how a lab decides what to build

A frontier lab's roadmap is set by a few executives and shaped by its largest customers and its capital partner. OpenAI's CFO told investors on 14 Aug 2026 that "The majority of our revenue is now enterprise" and that enterprise customers had "moved from tokenmaxxing to focusing on cost per unit of intelligence", a customer shift she cited as steering model and pricing decisions (CNBC). Ramp's data (4 Sep 2026): "the top 1% of customers account for 80% of enterprise revenue at both OpenAI and Anthropic"; at Anthropic, "Cursor and GitHub Copilot alone drove roughly $1.2 billion of the company's $5 billion revenue milestone" (PYMNTS). Microsoft keeps a 20% revenue share from OpenAI through 2030 and first-ship rights on Azure (CNBC, 27 Apr 2026). So the allocation signal in a lab is contracted revenue from a handful of accounts, read by a management team behind closed doors. On Bittensor the signal is the moving-average price of 125 tokens, read by a formula anyone can audit, and the formula is applied to about 3,555 TAO a day. Both systems are concentrated: the top 1% of wallets held about 90% of stake in Feb 2025, and one key can change the formula. The difference is not purity. It is that Bittensor's concentration, its rule changes and its winners are all public and on-chain, and anyone with a wallet, in any country, can move the vote tomorrow without asking. Stage line: "A lab asks its ten biggest customers what to build. We ask anyone who is willing to lose money on the answer."

---
## Deliverable 4. The empowerment frame for the talk

### Ten sentences Jacob can say

Shape: "You can X. Y does that tonight. Z did last month." Each pairs a thing a person can now do with a live subnet and a dated number. Say the source in the room only if asked; every one is in this file.

1. **Compute, buy.** "You can rent a GPU tonight with no account check, no ID and no sales call. Lium does that. Last month 1,187 people and agents paid it $964,000, and right now 1,227 of its 1,449 cards are rented." (@lium_io, 9 Sep 2026; lium.io/api/executors/stats, 17 Sep 2026)
2. **Compute, sell.** "You can point the graphics card in your bedroom at the network and be paid by a stranger on another continent. Lium lists cards from 68 datacenters in 21 countries; Engy paid 77 miners $12,700 last week for serving open models on gaming cards." (@lium_io, 9 Sep 2026; provider.engy.ai epoch 13, 9–16 Sep 2026)
3. **Inference, open models.** "You can run a 2.8-trillion-parameter open model that no lab licensed to you. Engy serves Kimi K3 on eighty RTX 5090s. Its miners answered 3.8 million requests last week." (@totheagi, 27 Jul 2026; Engy ledger epoch 13)
4. **Inference, private.** "You can call any open model through an API that cannot read your prompt. Chutes does that inside sealed hardware, 2.4 million requests a day this week, and 315,000 different users in the year Harvard measured." (api.chutes.ai 7-day average to 16 Sep 2026; arXiv 2608.13573)
5. **Inference, the labs' own models.** "You can buy Claude and GPT below their makers' list price through an enclave the router cannot see into. gm does that; 96 billion tokens so far, and it listed GPT-6 Astra a week before OpenRouter did." (@say_gm_, 4 and 7 Sep 2026)
6. **Training, pre-training.** "You can start a training run across strangers' machines. I did, on IOTA: 128 nodes, five minutes, five TAO. Gamers in 16 countries have joined its Train at Home." (@const_reborn, 3 Jun 2026; @IOTA_SN9, 30 Jun 2026) Follow with the honest line: "Teutonic-II is the largest permissionless run anyone has attempted, 110 billion parameters, and it is not finished. That is the job." (@const_reborn, 24 Aug 2026)
7. **Free intelligence.** "You can make an open model better and be paid the day you do, with no application and nobody's approval. Affine pays five open slots about $50,000 a week each. After the June base switch its miners crowned five champions in five days." (@affine_io, 23 Aug and 24 Jun 2026)
8. **Knowledge.** "You can be paid for a mathematical proof no one else has found, checked by a machine, not a committee. Conjectures paid this month for the near-half-density case of Green's Problem 51, open for sixteen years." (@conjectures_io, 9 Sep 2026)
9. **Data.** "You can store your files where egress is free. Hippius served 100 terabytes in a month and billed zero for bandwidth; AWS would have billed $8,000." (@Hippius_cloud, 8 May 2026)
10. **Agents, and the door.** "You can write a shopping agent in Vancouver and be paid by people who never met you. Oro paid 1,206 miners $200,000 in its first 36 days. Then Y Combinator followed the token." (@oroagents, 20 May and 8 Sep 2026)

Two alternates if a sentence above falls on the day:
- **Media.** "You can be paid as a creator by a brand with no agency in between. Bitcast's second-quarter revenue, $105,499, exceeded what it paid its miners. The incubators told its founders the idea did not belong here." (SubConnect, Aug 2026; @Bitcast_network, 24 Jul 2026)
- **Governance.** "You can decide what gets built. Two million TAO, about 450 million dollars, has been moved by holders out of the passive pool and into specific subnets since February 2025. Nobody approved those choices." (on-chain, 13 Feb 2025 vs 17 Sep 2026)

Do not say (see the fact-check and Deliverable 3): "on par with Opus 4.6"; "best model ever trained outside a lab"; "Chutes serves 120–160 billion tokens a day" (that was mid-2025); any revenue total without attribution; "fully decentralized".

### One-slide layout: the five layers

Jacob's own structure (13 Sep 2026): "we will need compute / inference / data / knowledge / if we are going to have free intelligence". White background, black type. Five rows. Left: the layer and the verb. Middle: the subnet names (the first in bold). Right: one number, dated.

| Layer | What you can do | Subnets (bold = the number's source) | One number |
|---|---|---|---|
| **Compute** | rent or sell a GPU, no ID | **Lium SN51**, Targon SN4, KubeTEE SN90 | 1,449 GPUs listed, 1,227 rented, $964K billed last month (17 Sep / 9 Sep 2026) |
| **Inference** | run any open model, privately | **Chutes SN64**, Engy SN53, gm SN28 | 2.4M requests a day; a 2.8T-parameter model on 80 gaming cards (16 Sep / 27 Jul 2026) |
| **Data** | store and fetch without a cloud contract | **Hippius SN75**, Desearch SN22, Data Universe SN13 | 100 TB of egress in a month, billed $0 (8 May 2026) |
| **Knowledge** | train a model, prove a theorem, with anyone | **Teutonic SN3**, IOTA SN9, Conjectures SN66 | a 110B-parameter permissionless training run (24 Aug 2026); a 16-year-old open problem solved (9 Sep 2026) |
| **Free intelligence** | improve an open model and be paid the same day | **Affine SN120**, Albedo SN97 | five open slots, about $50,000 a week each (23 Aug 2026) |

Footer line for the slide: "128 markets. 23 with paying customers. 2 million TAO moved by holders to choose them. One key left to remove." (This file; Deliverable 3; project-context on the sudo key.)

Alternative footer if the room is technical: "About 3,555 TAO a day, roughly $800,000, paid to whoever produces, under rules the same for all." (on-chain issuance, 17 Sep 2026)

---
## Conflicts and unverified items (consolidated)

1. **Two emission series.** Gross modelled share (EMA price through the gate; block 9,088,085) vs directly measured TAO injected into pools (7-day average to block 9,087,756). Ranks agree at the top; percentages differ for young subnets (Minos 6.7% vs 11.0%; Lium 11.9% vs 8.4%). Trackers differ again (bittensor.ai Score 2.49% vs model 4.7%). Use ranks on slides.
2. **Market-cap definitions differ by tracker** (taostats: price × (pool + staked alpha); SubnetRadar: total supply; bittensor.ai: staked only). All-subnet total: $1.10B (taostats def.), 5.66M TAO at spot.
3. **Dates of the emission-rule changes**: project notes say June 2026 / spec 440; releases page lists V440 under July, price-return under 22–25 June (specs 421–423).
4. **Templar's fall**: −55–63% (tracker snapshots in earlier notes) vs ">50%" (tao.media).
5. **Yuma's Root Reborn critique**: 19 Jun (project notes) vs 20 Jun 2026 (TAO Daily write-up).
6. **Validator concentration**: top 10 ≈ 65% (Yellow.com, Apr 2026) vs 56.5% (taostats via Our Crypto Talk, Jun 2026).
7. **Minos registration**: 2 Feb 2026 (on-chain) vs March 2026 (SubnetRadar).
8. **Lium's location**: Datura workforce "Georgia, Poland, and Spain" (LinkedIn); Desearch founders verified in Tbilisi; Lium core contributors pseudonymous. Do not say "Lium is built in Georgia".
9. **Targon**: GPU count and ARR (team) vs on-chain and SubConnect. **Synth**: source of the $100K buyback. **Green Compute**: revenue and testimonials. **ByteLeap, UR, BitMind, Gopher, Vanta**: team-stated user and revenue numbers.
10. **Koyuki Nakamori "turned down OpenAI"**: her own account via a podcast write-up. **Bitcast "incubators questioned"**: the team's own thread. **Fish's 120 GPUs**: his own Medium post.
11. **Affine**: "$50,000 per week per slot" is the team's figure at Aug prices and emissions; no named miner confirms it.
12. **X handles** for Teutonic, Hone, RedTeam, CliqueAI, Feval and the placeholder slots could not be verified; several team accounts are suspended (see Deliverable 1 notes).
13. **"7-day issuance"**: inflated by a one-off 172,001 TAO accounting mint at block 9,075,799 (15 Sep 2026, runtime 459, PR #3162). Use the 1-day figure (3,555 TAO).

---

## Sources

On-chain (finney; archive node `wss://archive.chain.opentensor.ai:443` for history), read 17 Sep 2026
- `SubnetInfoRuntimeApi.get_all_dynamic_info` at block 9,087,743 and at 43 blocks from 9,037,356 to 9,087,756 (every 1,200 blocks): names, symbols, owner keys, pool reserves, `tao_in_emission`, identities (`SubnetIdentitiesV3`).
- `SubtensorModule.TotalIssuance`, `SubnetTAO`, `SubnetAlphaIn`, `SubnetAlphaOut`, `TotalStake` at blocks 4,920,351; 5,400,000; 6,000,000; 6,600,000; 7,103,976; 7,700,000; 8,300,000; 8,900,000; 9,087,756 (`Timestamp.Now` for dates).
- `SubnetMovingPrice`, `MinerBurned`, `SubnetEmissionEnabled`, `EmissionBarRank`, `EmissionGateExponent`, `FirstEmissionBlockNumber` at block 9,088,085; `TaoWeight`, `SubnetOwnerCut`, `RootWeightSettingEnabled`, `EmissionValues` (block 4,750,000), `NetworkRegisteredAt` (block 9,087,840).
- taostats.io/subnets embedded data, block 9,087,742, 17 Sep 2026 13:41 UTC (identities with X handles and summaries; pools; hyperparameters; `active_miners`, `active_validators`, `registration_timestamp`, `price_change_1_month`).
- CoinGecko TAO/USD $225.60, 17 Sep 2026 13:40 UTC.

Live product endpoints, fetched 17 Sep 2026
- https://api.chutes.ai/invocations/stats/llm (daily requests and tokens per model, 30 Jan 2025–17 Sep 2026)
- https://lium.io/api/executors/stats (GPU counts by type)
- https://provider.engy.ai/api/subnet/v1/epoch/latest (epoch 13, 9–16 Sep 2026: miners, requests, tokens, settled micro-USD)
- https://saygm.com/miners (latest finalized epoch, $607.46 served)
- https://stats.bitcast.network (revenue, buybacks, creators)

Protocol and releases
- dTAO whitepaper https://www.bittensor.com/dtao-whitepaper ; docs https://www.bittensor.com/docs/concepts/emissions (snapshot 11 Aug 2026)
- Releases https://www.bittensor.com/releases : V440 https://www.bittensor.com/releases/v440-upgrade ; V441 https://www.bittensor.com/releases/v441-upgrade ; V447 https://www.bittensor.com/releases/conviction-normalization ; V448 https://www.bittensor.com/releases/v448-upgrade ; V450 https://www.bittensor.com/releases/v450-upgrade ; V461 https://www.bittensor.com/releases/v461-upgrade
- subtensor code https://github.com/opentensor/subtensor/blob/main/pallets/subtensor/src/coinbase/subnet_emissions.rs ; https://github.com/opentensor/subtensor/blob/main/pallets/subtensor/src/coinbase/run_coinbase.rs ; PR #2759 (Root Reborn) https://github.com/opentensor/subtensor/pull/2759 ; PR #3162 (root pot reconciliation) https://github.com/opentensor/subtensor/pull/3162

Subnet teams (websites, GitHub, X; all read 17 Sep 2026; handles listed in the map)
- Tweets read via the X API v2 or https://api.fxtwitter.com/<handle>/status/<id>: every URL quoted in Deliverable 2 and Deliverable 4. X API project usage before/after this task: 4,049 → 4,201 (152 tweet reads).
- Founder sources: Fish Medium post (11 Apr 2024) https://medium.com/@surcyf/bittensor-mining-a-deep-dive-e124fa5748c1 ; Jon Durbin LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/jon-durbin-81330a168 and GitHub https://github.com/jondurbin ; Ning Ren LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/renning22 ; Pierre Manseau GitHub https://github.com/KubeTEE-AI/kubetee-subnet and LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/pamanseau ; Giga Chkhikvadze dev.to https://dev.to/chkhikvadze/building-desearch-an-ai-search-api-for-x-twitter-reddit-and-web-lck and Ventura Labs podcast ep. 67 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MYAFgaXJ89c ; Mirian Okradze LinkedIn posts (22 and 29 Jun 2026); Thanh Luan Tran GitHub https://github.com/toilaluan and LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/toilaluan ; Polaris https://x.com/polariscloudai ; Dendrite https://dendrite.holdings ; Barbarian GitHub https://github.com/Barbariandev/MANTIS
- Interviews and write-ups: TAO Daily https://taodaily.io/meet-koyuki-from-applied-math-to-two-bittensor-subnets/ (6 Jun 2026); https://taodaily.io/ex-ai-engineer-turned-down-openai-to-build-on-bittensor/ (10 Jul 2026); https://taodaily.io/vincent-rapidos-journey-from-skepticism-to-contributing-on-bittensor/ (28 Jul 2026); https://taodaily.io/will-blears-how-aerospace-trading-and-a-chance-encounter-led-to-bitcast-sn93/ (19 Jul 2026); https://taodaily.io/bittensor-subnet-49-takeover-polaris-deregistered-nepher-ai-assumes-ownership/ (1 Nov 2025); https://taodaily.io/polaris-responds-to-deregistration-with-a-new-path-forward/ ; https://taodaily.io/how-innerworks-built-redteam-sn61-into-a-seven-figure-business/ (11 Aug 2026); https://taodaily.io/oro-becomes-first-live-token-crypto-startup-accepted-into-y-combinator/ (9 Sep 2026); https://taodaily.io/lium-flips-chutes-as-bittensors-top-subnet-while-scaling-high-speed-gpu-rentals/ (10 Sep 2026); https://taodaily.io/how-bittensor-rebuilt-its-core-economics-across-three-releases/ (29 Jun 2026); https://taodaily.io/yuma-weighs-in-on-root-reborns-design/ (20 Jun 2026); https://taodaily.io/why-minos-bittensor-subnet-107-could-become-a-unicorn/ ; SimplyTao https://simplytao.ai/blog/max-sebti-score-sn44-interview (9 Jun 2026); taoprotocol.org https://taoprotocol.org/affine-sn120-update-model-migration-and-an-evaluation-bug/ (25 Jun 2026), https://taoprotocol.org/bittensor-stopped-paying-57-subnets-heres-the-new-math/ (23 Jun 2026); tao.media https://www.tao.media/how-subnets-compete-for-emissions/ (21 Aug 2026), https://tao.media/covenant-ais-bittensor-exit-what-happened-how-bittensor-responded-and-whats-next-for-the-network/ (14 May 2026), https://www.tao.media/consts-root-reborn-proposal-seeks-to-replace-subnet-sell-pressure-with-continuous-reinvestment/ (16 Jun 2026); This Week in Startups E2326 (17 Aug 2026) https://castro.fm/episode/iZBeag

Trackers and analysis
- subnetradar.com (subnet pages, Discord digests, Engy deep dive 25 Jul 2026); bittensor.ai/subnets/<n>; taopedia.org; subnetalpha.ai; dtaoscan.io; taoflows.app; neuralteq.com/bittensor-emission-gate (29 Jul 2026)
- SubConnect Bittensor Revenue Index Vol. I (26 Aug 2026) https://share.sendnow.live/s/subconnect-revenue-index-1 ; ownyourmind.ai (https://ownyourmind.ai/projects/bittensor/ ; /tokenomics/bittensor-dtao-subnet-economics/ ; /tokenomics/lium-bittensor-subsidy-ratio/ ; /tokenomics/chutes-bittensor-revenue-machine/); Yuma State of Bittensor Vol. 2 (Feb 2026) https://www.yumaai.com/updates/state-of-bittensor-volume-2.pdf ; FalconX State of Bittensor (May 2026) https://www.falconx.io/newsroom/state-of-bittensor-subnet-adoption-trends-network-mechanics-and-covenants-departure ; DeSpread https://research.despread.io/dtao/ (20 Mar 2025); PANews https://www.panewslab.com/en/articles/ss1vyrcj (Mar 2025); HTX Research (19 Mar 2025); Sawinyh https://sawinyh.com/blog/bittensor-tao-tokenomics/ ; Tokenomist https://tokenomist.ai/research/bittensor-and-subnets-how-the-emission-engine-works ; arXiv 2507.02951 https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.02951 ; Our Crypto Talk https://ourcryptotalk.com/news/bittensor-root-reborn-pr-2759 (16 Jun 2026); crypto.news on Yuma's critique; Blockworks token transparency filing https://blockworks.com/token-transparency/filing/bittensor ; Templar audit https://www.tplr.ai/teutonic-1-audit.pdf (20 Aug 2026); arXiv 2608.13573 (Chutes trace paper)

Lab comparison
- CNBC, 14 Aug 2026 https://www.cnbc.com/2026/08/14/openai-cfo-friar-tells-investors-that-enterprise-bigger-than-consumer.html ; CNBC, 27 Apr 2026 https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/27/openai-microsoft-partnership-revenue-cap.html ; PYMNTS, 4 Sep 2026 https://www.pymnts.com/news/artificial-intelligence/2026/openai-and-anthropic-get-80percent-of-revenue-from-1percent-of-customers/

Related store documents: `docs/project-context.md` ("The face", 17 Sep; "Corrected core", "Uncensorable alternatives", "The exit is not a place", "What the exit cannot be"); `docs/research/top-subnets-2026.md` (12 Sep); `docs/research/affine-neurips-factcheck.md` (16 Sep); `docs/research/state-of-bittensor-2026.md` (12 Sep).

Working files (not in the store): `/tmp/eco/` on the research VM: `chain_subnets.json`, `emissions_7d.json`, `root_history*.json`, `gross_shares.json`, `subnets_master.csv`, `map_a/b/c.md`, `faces.md`, `dtao.md`.