Founders leave. Incentives remains. $TAO Sam left. Shak stepped back. And then something happened?
In March 2026, Covenant trained Covenant-72B on SN3 Templar. 72 billion parameters. 1.1 trillion tokens. Permissionlessly. On commodity hardware. Jensen Huang called it out. The ecosystem rallied.
Then, on April 10, Sam Dare dumped 37,000 $TAO into the market and walked out calling Bittensor "decentralization theatre." $900M in market cap. Gone. In hours.
Shak, the original builder behind SN62 @ridges_ai, stepped back too.
Two of the most visible names in the ecosystem. Gone.
And yet.
Community miners and operators (with Const stepping in) from SN3, SN39, and SN81 started rebuilding SN3 (Templar) from the open-source code. SN39 and SN81 were hit much harder and are still struggling.
But the chain never stopped. Emissions never stopped for the rest of the network. The protocol kept running.
This is exactly why Bittensor is not a cult of personality. When a big team leaves and dumps, the network doesn’t die. The code stays open. Miners and validators stay. New people can (and are) stepping in. from open-source code.
70% of all $TAO remained staked through the entire crash.
Const even responded within hours. He denied most of the claims, explained that he sold some alpha because those subnets were barely running (near 100% burn rate), and immediately proposed the Locked Stake mechanism (BIT-0011).
Teutonic stepped into where Templar left off. They are now targeting a 1-trillion-parameter decentralized training run. The largest ever attempted. No Sam required.
Ridges rewrote its codebase, shipped new miner tooling, launched a new incentive mechanism, and kept building. @DCGco's Barry Silbert called it out by name in the State of Bittensor report. No Shak required.
This is what people don't understand.
Subnet owners are exactly that subnet owners. Nothing more, nothing less. They are one moving part inside 128 competing markets. When one leaves, the incentive structure doesn't mourn. It adapts. Someone else steps in. The protocol keeps running.
This isn't a cult of personality.
It never was.
It's composability. It's the design. It's 128 subnets, each one a specialized market, each one composable with the next, collectively building something that no single founder controls and no single exit can stop.
That's the thesis.
That's always been the thesis.
The team doesn't make it great.
The individual doesn't make it great.
The compilation of everything does.
Most people only saw the 25% crash. They missed the proof that came right after it.
Time will settle this argument.
And I'll have said it from here.
$TAO
Not financial advice, always DYOR.
AI Crypto x Big Tech, Partnership Recap
$TAO: Dippy AI (Subnet #11) co-hosted Google's "Planet Scale Consumer AI" event at Google Canada HQ alongside leading subnets
$FET: MOBI consortium member alongside BMW, Bosch, Ford, GM, Renault, Accenture and IBM. European Blockchain Alliance member. Past initiatives with BMW and Bosch
$RENDER: NVIDIA GTC keynote speaker. Official Blackwell GPU integration. Governance proposal expanding to H100/H200/A100 enterprise GPUs
$AKT: NVIDIA GTC official sponsor. Strategic partners include NVIDIA, Prime Intellect, and https://t.co/VElq4qEzbA. NVIDIA's https://t.co/nWHeoIHwt5 acquisition made NVIDIA a primary indirect partner
$IO: 73+ partners across AI agents, privacy infrastructure, and foundational models. Phala Network integration for TEE-enabled H100/H200 GPU access
$PHA: Blender Developer Fund Corporate Gold Member alongside Intel, Microsoft, AWS, NVIDIA, and Adobe. Linux Foundation Confidential Computing Consortium member alongside Google, Microsoft, and Facebook
$ORAI: Google for Startups Cloud Program Scale tier - $100K in Google Cloud credits with extension to $200K possible
$NMR: $500M commitment from JPMorgan Asset Management. Backed by Paul Tudor Jones. 15 consecutive months of positive performance
$ATH: $260M enterprise contract via Axe Compute deploying 2,304 NVIDIA B300 GPUs. 36-month contract in US Tier 3 data center
$LINK: Google Cloud partner since 2019. Chainlink Runtime Environment integrates with Google Gemini AI and Firebase. SWIFT, BMW, Amazon, and Coinbase partnerships
$VIRTUAL: Google Cloud and AWS integrated x402 protocol - $600M in AI micropayments processed by November 2025
$ORIGIN: Google Vertex AI integration. Sustainable Medicines Partnership alongside Google, AstraZeneca, Pfizer, and Honeywell. Enterprise clients include Walmart and Google
$CTXC: AWS Independent ISV Accelerate Program. AWS Marketplace availability. AWS End-User Computing Partner Advisory Board member
$OCEAN: IBM Watson AI XPRIZE Technical Partner. Enterprise partnerships with Daimler AG, Roche Diagnostics, and Thai Ministry of Health
Google. Microsoft. NVIDIA. JPMorgan. IBM. AWS. BMW. SWIFT.
The biggest institutions in the world are not watching AI crypto from the sidelines.
They are already inside it
Ngày nào cũng kill long/short trên $500M cho thấy thị trường to hơn rất nhiều so với chu kỳ 2021.
Qua rất nhiều gian khổ, khi thị trường khởi sắc trở lại cũng sẽ bùng nổ hơn gấp nhiều lần giai đoạn 2021, bản thân mình luôn giữ vững niềm tin đó.
Hiện tại tỷ lệ short đang nhiều hơn Long, thị trường phần lớn đều bearish, view $BTC về vùng 90 trước khi phục hồi trở lại, đồng nghĩa liquid vùng ATH đang dày đặc.
Cùng chờ đón những diễn biến hấp dẫn nhất trong tháng này!