First published 24 March 2023, the week the current network opened. Expanded in October 2026 for the first halving and for subnet tokens. Bittensor is a network that pays people to run machine-learning models and to judge those models. TAO is the token the payment is denominated in. The pitch is a market for machine intelligence. The mechanism is narrower: a subnet defines a task and a score, miners submit work, validators score it, and new TAO flows to the addresses the score rewards. A high score is the subnet’s opinion. It is not a warranty that the model is right, safe, or useful outside that subnet.
Jacob Steeves and Ala Shaabana started the project. The Opentensor Foundation sits beside the software. What is Polkadot (DOT)? uses the same Substrate toolkit this chain is built with. Bittensor is not a Polkadot parachain, and TAO is not DOT.
Three networks, one of them current
The first iteration, Kusanagi, ran in early 2021 and was halted that May. A successor, Nakamoto, launched in November 2021 and carried over the TAO that had already been mined, on the order of 546,000 tokens. On 20 March 2023 that chain was succeeded by Finney, which is the network still producing blocks. A balance, a tutorial, or a miner from before Finney is not automatically on Finney. Read which network the wallet is pointed at.
Twenty-one million, halved by issuance
The cap is 21 million TAO, copied from Bitcoin’s number and not from Bitcoin’s chain. Blocks are aimed at about twelve seconds. New TAO is minted each block. The cut happens when issued supply crosses a threshold, halfway through whatever room is left under the cap, not when a block height comes due. The first cut was 15 December 2025, from 1 TAO a block to 0.5. Some TAO spent to register on the network is recycled back into the unissued supply rather than destroyed. Recycling pushes the next threshold further out. A countdown that ignores recycling is a drawing.
A halving slows new coins. It does not change the TAO you hold, and it does not tell you to move them.
Subnets and their own tokens
A subnet is a market for one kind of work: a model, a dataset, a computation. The owner sets what “good” means. Miners compete. Validators stake and score. In February 2025 an upgrade called dynamic TAO gave each subnet its own token, often called alpha, with its own pool against TAO. Staking into a subnet buys you that subnet’s token exposure. It is not the same object as TAO sitting in a wallet. A subnet token can go to nothing while TAO does not, and the reverse is also possible. Do not treat the word stake as one button.
Registration and fees are paid in TAO. They are not a share of a company. Nothing here is an instruction to mine, validate, register a subnet, or buy TAO.
