Bittensor

TAO is the coin of Bittensor, a blockchain that pays miners and validators for useful AI work across competing subnets.

Bittensor is a public blockchain that coordinates and pays for useful work, mostly in artificial intelligence. Its first network launched on 3 January 2021, and the current chain, Finney, has run since March 2023. TAO was fair-launched: there was no pre-sale or investor allocation, and every coin has been earned through the network. The Opentensor Foundation develops the chain and its software.

The network is split into subnets, each an independent market with its own task. Miners produce the work (for example AI model outputs), validators score it, and the chain pays both according to those scores. Since February 2025 each subnet also has its own token, called alpha, which trades against TAO in an on-chain pool; how much new TAO a subnet receives depends on demand for its alpha.

TAO has a hard cap of 21 million, like Bitcoin. New TAO is issued every 12-second block, and issuance halves in steps: the first halving on 15 December 2025 cut it to about 3,600 TAO a day, and the next is expected around December 2029. About 11.3 million TAO was in circulation on 27 September 2026, and roughly two thirds of it was staked with validators.

In the US, the Grayscale Bittensor Trust holds TAO and trades over the counter, with an application to list on NYSE Arca. In July 2024 about $8 million of TAO was stolen from users through a compromised software package, and the foundation halted the network while it responded.