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Bittensor Subnet Tokens Surge as TAO Rally Boosts Ecosystem

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Top Subnets table

Bittensor subnet tokens’ cumulative valuation has climbed to $1.5 billion as nearly every token in the ecosystem posts double- or triple-digit 30-day gains.

Decentralized artificial intelligence (AI) protocol Bittensor’s native TAO token has rallied roughly 90% over the past month from around $180 at the start of March to above $332 as of March 24, and the momentum is spilling over into its subnet token ecosystem.

According to CoinGecko data, the Bittensor Subnets category is up 30% over the past 24 hours to a combined market capitalization of $1.47 billion, with trading volume topping $118 million. Of the subnet tokens tracked on the platform, a significant number have posted triple-digit percentage gains over the past month.

Top Subnets table
Top Subnets

What Are Subnets?

Subnets are specialized mini-networks within the Bittensor ecosystem, each dedicated to a specific AI task, ranging from language model training and decentralized compute to sports prediction and cybersecurity. Miners within each subnet compete to produce high-quality AI outputs, while validators evaluate performance and allocate TAO rewards accordingly.

Since the launch of dynamic TAO (dTAO) in February 2025, each subnet operates as its own automated market maker with a natively assigned token. The valuation of each subnet token is determined by the amount of TAO staked into that subnet’s reserves, creating a direct economic link between TAO’s price and subnet token performance. The subnet ecosystem first crossed $500 million in April 2025, and by July 2025, the cumulative subnet market cap had neared $1 billion as TAO treasury companies like xTAO and Synaptogenix emerged.

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The relationship is reflexive: as TAO appreciates, each subnet’s TAO reserve becomes more valuable, inflating subnet token prices, which, in turn, attract more stakers and attention to the ecosystem.

Subnet Standouts

The TAO rally accelerated on March 20 after Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and investor Chamath Palihapitiya endorsed Bittensor’s decentralized AI training model on the All-In Podcast.

That enthusiasm has cascaded into subnet tokens. τemplar (SN3) — the subnet behind the Covenant-72B model that triggered the Nvidia-fueled rally — is now the top subnet token with a $137 million market cap after rallying 444% over the past month.

Other notable 30-day performers include OMEGA Labs (SN24) at 440%, Level 114 (SN114) at 280%, BitQuant (SN15) at 230%, Nova (SN68) at 218%, and Grail (SN81) at 211%.

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Even the more established subnet tokens with larger market caps have posted strong monthly returns. Chutes (SN64), which has a $132 million market cap, is up 54% over 30 days. Targon (SN4) has gained 166%, Ridges AI (SN62) is up 85%, and Hippius (SN75) has risen 115%.

The primary catalyst for the broader rally was the reveal of Covenant-72B, a large language model trained permissionlessly across Bittensor’s Subnet 3 by over 70 contributors using commodity internet hardware. The model was trained on 1.1 trillion tokens and achieved a 67.1 MMLU score, confirmed in a March 2026 arXiv paper, putting it in a competitive range with Meta’s Llama 2 70B.

The Nvidia CEO endorsed both proprietary and open-source AI models as complementary during the podcast appearance, framing foundational AI technology as benefiting from decentralized innovation.

Beta Play on Decentralized AI

The outsized returns in subnet tokens relative to TAO itself reflect a dynamic familiar to crypto markets: smaller-cap ecosystem tokens tend to act as leveraged bets on their parent protocol. With TAO’s market cap sitting at roughly $3 billion and individual subnet tokens ranging from $1 million to $110 million, the tokens offer significantly higher volatility in both directions.

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Looking ahead, the Bittensor network plans to expand its active subnet capacity from 128 to 256 later this year, which could bring a fresh wave of new subnet token launches and further broaden the category.

Before the first TAO halving in December 2025, subnets had already reached a cumulative $1.28 billion market cap, with Yuma, a subsidiary of Digital Currency Group, contributing to 14 different subnets. A potential regulatory decision on converting the Grayscale TAO Trust into a spot ETF could also provide additional institutional access by late 2026.

For now, the surge in subnet tokens signals that market participants are betting the decentralized AI narrative has staying power, and that Bittensor’s expanding network of specialized AI subnets will be at its center.

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Crypto World

Wall Street Will Eventually Submit To The Rules Of DeFi

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Wall Street Will Eventually Submit To The Rules Of DeFi

Opinion by: Mitchell Amador, founder and CEO of Immunefi

There’s an argument that regulation will split decentralized finance (DeFi) into two separate silos: one regulated and compliant and the other completely open and accessible by anyone, including anonymous participants.

This argument is outdated.

Regulatory pressure in 2026 will reshape DeFi into a network of interoperable, interlinked ecosystems with distinct risk, compliance and access profiles.

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Some tiers will become more compliant and institution-friendly, while others will remain open, permissionless and driven by onchain leverage and market experimentation.

This evolution won’t drag DeFi toward TradFi. Rather, it will bring TradFi into DeFi’s orbit.

DeFi already operates in multiple lanes

DeFi has never functioned as a single monolith; it operates across several concurrent compliance tiers.

The first lane is permissionless DeFi, where anyone can deploy a contract, supply liquidity and use leverage. This is the engine of innovation, where price discovery and stress testing happen in public, as does failure. Permissionless pools have no Know Your Customer (KYC), allow pseudonymous users and exist because global markets can move faster than regulated institutions.

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The next tier consists of protocols with built-in safeguards, like liquidation rules, governance frameworks and oracle protections, but no identity requirements. These serve people who want liquidity and yield with risk management.

Finally, there is the newer, heavily controlled lane, where KYC checks, geofencing and compliance filters are applied at the access-point level.

The same underlying smart contracts can still be reached, just through different gates.

Liquidity trumps isolation

Full isolation of compliant DeFi is unlikely. Capital seeks liquidity, and liquidity seeks composability. That means the regulated lanes will run through permissionless infrastructure.

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Institutions entering digital assets will want access to the scale of liquidity that only onchain markets can provide — 24/7 global access, near-instant settlement and depth that traditional venues cannot match. The passage of the GENIUS Act, which bans yield-bearing stablecoins, has already pushed institutional capital toward DeFi protocols in search of returns.

If the liquidity accessed is compelling enough, institutions will tolerate complexity and innovation risks. Regulation won’t eliminate this incentive.

Security innovation starts in the arena

Institutional and compliant participants care deeply about security, yet the center of gravity for security innovation will sit inside permissionless DeFi.

That may sound counterintuitive, given that over $3.1 billion was lost to hacks and exploits during the first half of 2025 alone.

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Related: For Wall Street’s most sophisticated trading firms, the next alpha is onchain

Adversarial conditions are precisely where robust defenses are forged. Bug bounty programs, real-time monitoring tools and AI-driven threat detection were all born in the permissionless environment and stress-tested against live exploits before any compliance framework adopted them.

This pattern will accelerate. New security models that range from automated vulnerability scanning to onchain firewalling will continue to emerge in open DeFi and will then be standardized and adopted by the institutional side once they prove effective.

Regulation will cement DeFi’s central role

Regulation will certainly not fracture DeFi. What we will see instead is how decentralized finance will cement its position at the center of global finance.

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The future, to be sure, is not compliant DeFi versus permissionless DeFi, because DeFi has the ability to be interoperable. It’s a network where open markets generate liquidity and innovation, and regulated players selectively plug in. That’s why we will see regulatory pressures mold the ecosystem into interconnected tiers, with some gravitating toward greater compliance and others toward the open marketplace, all of them linked by the composability that makes onchain finance uniquely powerful.

That dynamic will inevitably draw TradFi closer to DeFi as institutions seek out the far greater liquidity, speed and efficiency of decentralized markets.

Opinion by: Mitchell Amador, founder and CEO of Immunefi.