Timothy Ellington

Every now and then, you come across an article you just can't stop reading. This was one of those for me. I know I'm biased because I'm so deeply involved in the $TAO ecosystem, but I found myself agreeing with so many points made in this article by Stillcore Capital. One part in particular stood out to me, together with the image below. How Bittensor makes intelligence. I've been talking for quite some time about how Bittensor is much more than just an AI project. It's an ecosystem of competing markets producing digital commodities, and this image does an excellent job of showing how those markets fit together. You have subnets providing the raw commodities like compute, storage and data. Other subnets use those resources for pretraining and post-training models, while inference subnets make those models available to the end users. And the beautiful thing is that every single part of this supply chain is its own competitive market, incentivized to produce the best possible output at the lowest possible cost. But what makes this even more interesting is how these markets are strengthening each other. A subnet improving its compute offering makes training cheaper for other subnets, which in turn improves the models being served by inference subnets. Better, faster and cheaper inference attracts more customers, creating additional demand for the commodities further down the supply chain. This is where I believe the real power of Bittensor lies. Not in one subnet becoming the next big AI company, but in an entire ecosystem of specialized markets that can build on each other's output and become increasingly competitive as a whole. And unlike a traditional AI company, where all these decisions are made internally, Bittensor uses open competition and incentives to coordinate. Now add the economic relationship between Alpha tokens and TAO, where every subnet operates within an economy connected through TAO, and you start to understand why I believe the whole ecosystem is much more interesting than the sum of its individual parts. The more useful commodities the network produces, the more possibilities emerge for other subnets to build on top of them. And the more external demand these combined products attract, the greater the opportunity for real economic value to flow back into the ecosystem. This is what I've been referring to when I say Bittensor is growing from the inside out. We're still very early in seeing how all these different markets will work together, but the foundations are becoming increasingly visible. Excellent article by Stillcore Capital, and I highly recommend reading the entire thing.