Bittensor's dTao upgrade and EVM compatibility have brought it more visibility

Bittensor has been around since 2021, but recent developments have brought it more visibility

Bittensor, a cryptocurrency project focused on a decentralized artificial intelligence (AI) network, has steadily gained attention in recent months.

While other crypto-AI projects have been making headlines with mega-fundings, like Nous Research, Sentient, and Sahara AI recently securing around $200 million in total, most of them are concentrating on single AI markets, be it inference or computing.

But Bittensor is positioning itself as a coordination layer for all of it, Jacks highlighted, adding that despite the hefty sums raised by the other projects, they've managed to create an ecosystem with several hundred million dollars in funds.

"These projects are not true competitors to Bittensor, and actually most of them should become subnets in the Bittensor ecosystem and become even bigger companies," Jacks asserted.

He used the instance of Chutes, a serverless AI compute subnet developed by Rayon Labs and capable of processing nearly 2 trillion pieces of text since its launch just a few months ago.

"If this one subnet was valued as a startup like Anthropic or Cohere or Mistral, it would probably be worth $10 billion, maybe $15 billion."

Apart from his role as an investor, Jacks is also involved in building ecosystem tools through his other venture, Latent Holdings. These tools include TAO.app, a metrics tracker for the Bittensor network, and TAO Hash, a subnet aiming to decentralize Bitcoin hashrate.

"Bittensor is to capitalism what Bitcoin is to fiat," Jacks said.

This comparison to Bitcoin is frequently made by Bittensor supporters, mainly due to their shared fixed 21 million token supply, halving mechanism, and permissionless philosophy. However, Kuplewatzky from Wintermute maintains that this comparison is "a gross oversimplification and doesn't really do justice to either."

He pointed out that TAO's price movements are more aligned with other Layer 1 tokens, which might indicate investors are perceiving TAO as an ecosystem token, not a store of value like bitcoin.