What is Bittensor (TAO)?

Bittensor is a network, founded in 2021 without a pre-sale to investors, that pays people in its coin, TAO, for contributing to artificial intelligence tasks. It is split into many subnets, each focused on a different task. TAO's supply copies Bitcoin's: a 21 million cap and regular halvings.

How it works

• Subnets. Each subnet targets one kind of AI work.
• Miners and validators. In each subnet, miners do the work and validators score how useful it is. TAO rewards are shared according to those scores.
• Subnet tokens. Since February 2025, an upgrade called dynamic TAO has let people invest in individual subnets through their own tokens. In November 2025 there were 129 active subnets.

"Miners" here means contributors of AI work, not the Bitcoin-style miners of Lesson 4.

Supply

• The total is capped at 21 million TAO.
• New TAO is created every day and paid out as rewards.
• Its first halving was scheduled for mid-December 2025, cutting daily issuance from about 7,200 to about 3,600 TAO. Halvings come roughly every four years, as with Bitcoin (Lesson 5).

What people use it for

People run miners or validators to earn TAO, buy subnet tokens and hold or trade TAO.

Risks to know

• Hard to judge. It is difficult for an outsider to tell whether a subnet's work is useful or just set up to collect rewards. Lesson 19 explains how to research a project.
• Rewards from new coins. Much of what participants earn is newly created TAO. Lesson 50 explains why such yields are worth less than they look.
• Subnet tokens add risk. Each subnet token can fall to zero on its own.
• Price swings. TAO can fall far and fast, like other coins.

Learn more

Lesson 5 covers capped supply and halvings, Lesson 11 covers altcoins, and Lesson 19 explains how to research a project.