Revenue Search: Inside Bittensor

In this session Siam and Mark banter about experimenting with a Mac mini/“Claude bot” and runaway token costs before interviewing Gustave from Mentat Minds about their non-custodial way to allocate TAO into Bittensor subnets via themed index baskets (e.g., prediction/inference), a “Sum of Subnets” product, price-weighted entries with optional monthly rebalancing, and a 9% fee taken only from staking yield; they cover validator selection, user mix, roadmap (more verticals and curated third-party strategies), and address questions on licensing and fees, while the hosts share a portfolio philosophy favoring asymmetric, lower-price subnets near dereg floors and monitoring chain-buy flows fo...

Mark and Siam return after a break with a surprise guest: Shaq from Ridges. They recap Davos/AI House meetings (Chris, Etienne, Max), then explain how they partner with Bitstarter to vet code and teams (Quasar as the first collab, later incubated by Const). They’ve been buying/minting slots—including freshly minted subnet 99 (“99 Problems”)—and are actively placing strong teams. Shak joins to unpack the Ridges × Latent Holdings move: not an exit from the tensor but a “full-stack” combo to speed shipping (tensor + incentives + product/GTM), keep beta quality high, and aim for an end-to-end “wow” launch that can go viral. Lesso...

Mark and Siam kick off the first Revenue Search of 2026 and bring on Felix from subnet 91, Tensorprox. A decentralized “bouncer” layer that sits between clients and servers to stop DDoS and bad traffic while keeping legitimate requests flowing; it onboards in minutes (auto-detects ports), is paid in fiat, bills in 15-minute increments (~$0.07; roughly $200/month for 100 Mbps), and aims to be more resilient than centralized providers like Cloudflare/AWS via miners distributed across multiple clouds. Felix outlines target customers (infrastructure/GPU providers, web3/crypto projects, AI startups), referral-based sales, possible OpenAI marketplace distribution, near-term scaling (effectively unlimited with IPv6), and a pl...

The hosts open with travel/gossip (Mark dialing in from Dubai) and a firm PSA about why they won’t confirm wallet/subnet rumours, They then bring on Yoav, Garrett and Gyles from Tensor Group to debut tao.com, a rebuilt Bittensor wallet (iOS live now; Android targeted for Q1) that makes onboarding dead simple: fiat/TAO toggles, in-app TAO purchase via Coinbase Pay (debit or Coinbase), one-tap staking (abstracts “root/validators”), biometric Secure Enclave keys, clean portfolio/history, and rich subnet pages (stats, team, roadmap, news, search/sort) designed to drive conviction; UK rollout awaits FCA tweaks while US use...

Mark and Siam open with a candid TAO update (over-levered loans due, price drawdown, macro notes on TGA and QT) then bring on Akshat from Dippy, who explains Dippy as an AI-friend entertainment app (~8.6M users, ~1 hr/day engagement) adding tap-to-video (not real-time yet) and imminently voice calls; Dippy now runs all text inference on Bittensor SN-4 (Targon) via a six-figure deal and is pivoting SN-11 into a fast, cheap media-inference “studio” (deterministic TensorRT pipeline), currently serving ~2% of Dippy images with plans to ramp to 100% and open a self-serve API; they’ll resume consistent SN-11 alpha buybacks by redirecting $5–10k/month...

Mark and Siam join Max (Score / Subnet 44) for an update on Score’s shift from “just sports” to a broad computer-vision platform: they’ve built a new incentive mechanism that uses VLMs to generate pseudo-ground-truth and run twin tracks—an open, verifiable Hugging Face competition and a private client track—driving rapid gains toward a football “gold line” benchmark. Score’s first featured client, cricket strategist Nathan Leamon (Cards), explains how Score will replicate/extend Hawkeye-style ball-tracking from standard broadcast footage and power decisions from scouting/auctions through in-game tactics. Max outlines real-world uses beyond sport (petrol forecourts, retail, fruit grading, car...

A lively Revenue Search with guest Greg “Rizzo” unveiling two big threads: first, Subnet 45’s partnership with Talisman to turn its crypto wallet into an AI-augmented “smart” wallet—miners pull sentiment/relevance signals (e.g., via Subnet 64 and Data Universe), users set voice/dictation trading triggers (DCA, limit/TP/SL, on-chain events), with security handled via smart contracts and ledger/iOS support; revenue flows from tool usage and a share of Talisman trading fees earmarked for buy-and-burn. Second, Rizzo + DNA are forming a community-driven, NASDAQ-listed Digital Asset Treasury (target size ~$300M): subnet owners can contribute ALPHA for locked 3–5 year treasury holdi...

A live, on-location Revenue Search featuring LeadPoet, a Bittensor-powered subnet/product that automates outbound sales by crowdsourcing high-quality leads from miners, validating them, and selling them to clients—initially via sales agencies for scale. The model gates access by burning alpha, creating a flywheel (more demand → larger reward pool → tougher competition → better data → more demand) and plans to evolve from selling leads to booking meetings. Early pricing spans self-serve subscriptions, volume API, and enterprise deals, with strong emphasis on data quality, anti-gaming validation, and eventual conversion-based miner rewards via CRM integrations. Beta opens in December with an open-source qualification agent; ear...

After a short hiatus, Revenue Search returns with Crucible Labs: Ala and David explain why Crucible exists: do the unglamorous, high-leverage work the foundation can’t—validate and allocate, build research and investor materials (via Unsupervised Capital), ship a TAO-native wallet with an auto-allocator and Ledger support, and incubate/accelerate stronger subnets. A big theme is governance and speed: DTO changed incentives quickly by design; true decentralization is the destination, but right now rapid, iterative tweaks are vital to keep a permissionless system healthy. Their near-term North Star is onboarding capital and talent through clarity and tooling, not hype: make...

This Revenue Search spotlights Subnet 32 “It's AI,” an AI-text detector focused on education. Founder Sergey demos a clean web app that flags AI-written passages, highlights “AI-impactful” tokens, and generates shareable reports; it also offers plagiarism checks, batch scanning, API/Moodle/Zapier integrations, with Canvas coming. Citing a new, large unified benchmark (to be presented at an AI-in-education conference), It's AI claims top average accuracy (AUC ~0.92) versus GPTZero and others. The team targets universities with B2B plans while running low-cost miner inference; early revenue (~$2k/mo) comes mostly from enterprise subscriptions. Hosts push a go-to-market pivot: niche hard into higher-e...

This Revenue Search features Subnet 113 (Taonado)—a non-custodial, Tornado-style privacy mixer on the Bittensor EVM. Users deposit fixed denominations (starting with 1 TAO, with 10/100 TAO pools planned), receive a secret note, and later withdraw to a fresh wallet to break linkability; miners simulate realistic flows to deepen the anonymity set and earn the subnet’s alpha. Revenue comes from ~2.5–5% mixing fees (plus gas) and “APY harvesting” by staking idle shielded capital, with an intent to auto buyback-and-burn the alpha. Contracts are a hardened Tornado fork, validation/scoring runs on-chain (no standalone validator), and the team is bootstrapping ~5,000 TAO liquidity to enable lar...

This Revenue Search jumps into a deep-dive with Bitcast (Tom & Will). Bitcast pitches itself not as an agency but a decentralised ad tooling layer that lets brands brief creators at scale, with AI verifying message-fit and rewards tied to real attention (watch time/eyeballs via official platform data), not vanity metrics. They share traction to date (hundreds of Bittensor videos, ~hundreds of thousands of views, big watch-time) and the blockers they’ve been fixing: a no-code miner (optional, 5% fee) to onboard non-technical creators, a social-proofed website + multilingual outreach, and a scalable “ad read” model where brands pre-fund a budget that c...

Siam kicks off by revealing a commissioned Bittensor artwork (“Michealeagτao”) he’s gifting to Const, then he and Mark run a no-guest AMA. They cover near-term market timing (expecting the bigger move into late-2025), the risk to compute subnets if TAO fell sharply (miner exodus) versus a healthier ecosystem at higher TAO, and how funding really follows credible, revenue-led plans (examples: Targon, sundae_bar, Shak recycling ~$1.4M into growth). A big chunk focuses on the TAO halving: pools fill more slowly so volatility rises for thinner subnets; historically halvings are “nothing-burgers” day-of, with the impact compounding over time.<...

Victor Teixeira (General TAO Ventures) traces his path from Contango Digital’s $10M blockchain–AI fund to becoming a full-stack Bittensor operator — incubating or advising multiple subnets (e.g., 23, Red Team, TPN), running the Round Table validator, and mining across the stack. He spotlights Subnet 35 (“Cartha”), an FX perp DEX co-built with Taoshi (Subnet 8): miners are either LPs or trader-miners; trading generates fees of which 50% go to LP miners and 40% go to vote-escrowed alpha holders as USDC dividends (weekly), creating aligned “alphanomics” that reduce sell pressure and reward real usage.The broader discussion centres on revenue-fir...

Gopher (ex-Masa) / Subnet 42 provides cryptographically verified, AI-ready data via a network of ~256 miners running trusted execution environments to scrape and normalise web/X/Reddit/TikTok plus large financial price feeds. Devs use a UI + API (credit-based billing) and a built-in vector DB to aggregate/search topics and power apps. Traction: ~77k users across products (≈54k on AI Insights; ≈20k on a new trading tool), ~$1M ARR, ~1k paying on the trading app launched ~2 weeks ago. That app ingests multi-timeframe price data, generates trade setups, and can execute on Hyperliquid; team claims ~65% win rate with ~1:4 risk-reward on internal accounts and will...

Vidaio (Subnet 85) does AI video upscaling (SD → HD/4K) and compression (dramatically smaller files with similar perceived quality). Their consumer web app is live in beta—demo showed ~95% size reduction—with paid tiers coming (think ~$0.05/min, ~75% margins). Beyond creators, the big targets are streamers/broadcasters, legacy libraries, security/medical, and autonomous fleets—anyone drowning in storage/CDN costs. Near-term roadmap adds a streaming pipeline (auto encoding ladders + Hippius storage), plus R&D on colorization and selective video generation/inpainting.For enterprises needing NDAs and tighter control, Vidaio introduced an Enterprise Track: vetted “Elite miners” execute jobs...

AWS went down, so we kicked it old-school on Zoom with Seby (RESI, Subnet 46). Quick refresher: RESI is building a real-estate oracle—unlocking U.S. property data and on-chain intelligence for lenders, DeFi/fractional RE, and proptech. Seby walked through fresh updates: a new white paper and alphanomics, DSV added to their OTC stack, V2 moves from APIs to scraping (cheaper for validators), V3 splits the subnet into data, inference, and storage (with Hippius) so prompts like “price this home from its inspection” fetch comps, analyze reports, and persist results. A public dashboard is rolling out, and go-to-market leans on IDX...

Mark and Siam sit down with Jill Kenney, CEO of sundae_bar (Subnet 121)—a publicly listed (AIM: ESBAR) AI agent marketplace that lets developers list, host, and monetise agents while businesses buy ready-to-use or customised agents for workflows (HR, sales, ops, etc.). The twist:tsundae_bar uses its BitTensor subnet as a supply engine—briefs (from users/miners) are voted on, miners build against them, validators/humans quality-check, and top agents get boosted in sundae_bar's search. Payments are live, early agents/templates (e.g., from LETA and NAT) can be deployed now, and the platform is builder-agnostic (they aim...

Mark and Siam sit down with Austin, founder of Aurelius (SN37)—an AI-alignment subnet built on Bittensor. In plain English: training gives models knowledge; alignment adds wisdom. Aurelius tackles the “alignment faking” problem by decentralising how alignment data is created and judged. Miners red-team models to generate high-resolution synthetic alignment data; validators score it against a living “constitution” (beyond simple Helpful-Honest-Harmless), aiming to pierce the model’s latent space and reliably shape behaviour. The goal is to package enterprise-grade, fine-tuning datasets (think safer, less hallucinatory chatbots and agents), publish results, and prove uplift—then sell into enterprises and researchers while explorin...

BitQuant (Subnet 15 by Open Gradient) wants to be your on-chain “pocket financial advisor”—chat in plain English, get analysis, and execute swaps across supported chains—all powered by a BitTensor subnet of competing miners.Guests: Matthew (ex-Two Sigma) and Advait (ex-UCL founder; PhD track) from Open Gradient. Their bigger vision: an L1 (Open Gradient) for verifiable, privacy-preserving AI agents (TEE + zkML) running on-chain. Their BitTensor product line is BitQuant (SN15): miners compete to produce higher-quality quantitative analysis and trade guidance that the frontend at bitquant.io turns into simple, chat-driven actions (discover, analyze, swap, manage risk).</