Asia Morning Briefing: Bittensor’s dTAO Paves a New Retail Path to AI, Distinct from Robinhood SPVs

Bittensor’s dTAO Provides Retail Investors Access to Decentralized AI

Bittensor’s subnet staking is emerging as a novel way for retail investors to gain exposure to decentralized AI, potentially offering upside that established players like OpenAI or Nvidia cannot provide.

Earlier this year, Robinhood made headlines by offering tokenized shares claiming to give retail users access to OpenAI through special purpose vehicles (SPVs). However, OpenAI’s counsel warned these tokens do not constitute equity and deemed the offering unauthorized, underscoring the potential risks for investors.

Most leading AI firms—including OpenAI and Anthropic—remain private, with growth captured by venture capital and strategic backers like Microsoft and Google. Retail investors are largely excluded, left to buy Big Tech stocks such as Nvidia or rely on synthetic exposure via SPVs.

Bittensor offers an alternative.

The network’s Dynamic TAO (dTAO) upgrade, launched in February 2024, allows TAO holders to allocate stakes directly to subnets—each hosting its own AI project—and earn “alpha” tokens based on performance. Staking decisions determine which projects receive network emissions, creating a market-driven incubator where value is rewarded for actual results.

“The subnets form an ecosystem within an ecosystem, rewarding performance and utility through staking returns and alpha token appreciation,” said Zerobit, CEO of Talisman, a wallet integrated with dTAO, at Taiwan Blockchain Week.

Two subnets highlight the system’s potential. Ridges (SN62), a coding agent, recently outperformed Anthropic’s Claude 4 on the SWE-Bench code benchmark, achieving over 80% accuracy while using only tens of thousands of dollars in compute. Chutes (SN64) acts as a decentralized, serverless compute backbone, processing billions of tokens daily and hosting large language models for open-source AI inference at scale—while reducing costs by up to 85% compared to centralized providers.

For retail investors, subnet staking offers a transparent, permissionless alternative to SPVs, with verifiable on-chain results.

“Unlike projects locked behind insider deals, Bittensor’s dTAO opens access from day one, allowing anyone to participate in AI’s growth through alpha tokens,” said Brad Fuller of Bittensor.ai.

With Anthropic and OpenAI still private, Bittensor provides one of the few ways for everyday investors to access early-stage AI upside without relying on Wall Street approval.

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