How dTAO drove Bittensor's ideological shift
The protocol's pull between collectivism and individualism
‘TAO is the only coin’.
Do you remember when people used to say that? If a Bittensor subnet owner suggested the involvement of another asset in their incentive mechanisms or overarching goals, they were shunned by the community. They were seen as trying to scam people, not having their focus directly angled at Bittensor, or diluting the ecosystem’s work.
Subnet slots have always been coveted positions, and subnet owners have always been the fabric holding the protocol together. Bittensor is an insular space, one that still doesn’t have many eyes on it, so any activity that was seen as distracting from the network’s goals was unwelcome.
You don’t hear these perspectives so much, anymore. For one, it’s simply not true. TAO hasn’t been the only coin, or asset, since February 2025. Dynamic TAO launched, and since then we now have an additional 128 assets. A market rose from under our feet. In the process, we’ve seen one of Bittensor’s biggest ideological shifts.
During my time here, I’ve witnessed the dominant belief-system switch from collective support of the protocol, to individualistic support of alpha. If you’ve been around before 2025, you’ve likely witnessed it, too. But how exactly has this played out, and is it for better or worse?
The end of the collective world
Prior to dTAO, every Bittensor fan held the same asset. Whether you were an investor, miner, validator, or owner - your primary focus in the protocol was on TAO and Bittensor’s underlying architecture. Those two concepts were soldered together. It was impossible to be a fan of TAO and be skeptical of its technological setup.
If you were a subnet owner, your goal was to make your subnet work, but underneath that goal was the desire to push Bittensor forward - to give it its breakout moment and help introduce the world to it. Subnet owners were proxy representatives for Bittensor. If a journalist was to write about the space, they’d likely be interested in knowing what it can do, not just how it operates. Therefore there was a focus on the output.
If you were a miner or validator you cared about supporting your subnet, because your role was to ensure these projects produced meaningful work, which would hopefully help drive up TAO price and introduce new people. And if you were an investor, you’d speak about Bittensor in terms of its collective processes. You’d list off its capabilities: training ML models, inference, protein-folding, decentralized storage, etc. You might also speak about Yuma Consensus, or incentivising intelligence, but that would really come down to how well-versed you were in the protocol, and who your target audience was. In other words, that type of dialogue was optional. Mentioning subnet-output was not.
Everybody was in lockstep towards a unified goal. In colloquial terms, everyone was pushing T.
That’s not to say there wasn’t some in-fighting between subnets, but these were mostly trivial or playful disputes. Bittensor’s had subnets with overlapping goals for a while, so it’s natural for some owners to feel others are stepping on their toes, but generally those issues could be easily resolved simply because both parties wanted the same thing: to prove what the protocol could do, and be a part of its breakout moment. Competition is a cornerstone of the network, so it was generally encouraged. Plus, if two subnets had similar goals, they likely shared some of the same miners, so there was cross-pollination already.
It was a collectivist culture. This is defined by social psychologist Harry Triandis as
‘[A] social pattern consisting of closely linked individuals who see themselves as parts of one or more collectives (family, co-workers, tribe, nation) [who] are primarily motivated by the norms of, and duties imposed by, those collectives; are willing to give priority to the goals of these collectives over their own personal goals; and emphasize their connectedness to members of these collectives’.
Everybody who was big in Bittensor was big in the same goals: supporting the ecosystem, bringing greater awareness to it, celebrating its achievements, and contributing to its success. That’s not to say the driver resting under Bittensor wasn’t financial, a feature all blockchain ecosystems share, but when it comes to active participation within the space going beyond merely investing, there’s always something else encouraging action. There are many ways of securing wealth within the crypto world, and so seeing people bind to a blockchain that’s lesser known than something like Bitcoin, Ethereum, or Solana indicates another force.
Bittensor maximalists were a hyper-galvanised group. It helps because the protocol’s architecture means you can make an active difference in shaping its future by more than holding assets and spreading the word. Miners and validators can contribute meaningful work, and owners get to define and modify the narrative around it.
There are downsides that came with this era, too. The laser-focus on Bittensor meant there was little excitement in connecting the chain to others around it. Interoperability was a rarely discussed topic. Despite Bittensor being built on Substrate, an interoperable-first blockchain developed by Polkadot - a network which popularised the concept of cross-chain activity - many in Bittensor didn’t even know they shared DNA. Even to this day, it’s not well-known. However, the best example of this is when the community ranged from being ambivalent to angry about the Opentensor Foundation’s decision to make the chain EVM compatible. After people pushing for TAO for so long, they felt it was unnecessary to bring Ethereum into the fold, as it would diminish Bittensor’s unique flair, and might invite unwanted activity that plagues Ethereum, such as memecoins and shady investment vehicles.
Insular blockchain communities are not unusual - in fact, since the mid-2010s community builders have been executing tribalist-style marketing. The web3 space arguably perfected this ‘in-crowd’ method of promotion and engagement, where people celebrated and critiqued their chains of choice in unison. From that, people form bonds under identical experiences. They also become highly protectionist, and wary of others coming in to instigate change. My point, that ‘TAO is the only coin’ is a perfect example of this - there may be meaningful ways of building incentive mechanisms which plug into other chains, but regardless, there was an overall feel of avoidance.
Bittensor’s current individualism
The launch of dTAO birthed a whole market within the ecosystem. Around 64 new assets were released, mapped to each existing subnet. TAO still existed, but it was now the parent to dozens of others. At the time, there was both excitement and worry about what the future held. This wasn’t exclusively because more assets were being introduced, but because dTAO came with major architectural changes, as well.
At its birth, people still felt united - everything is still within the ecosystem, everything is still a part of Bittensor, and so nothing immediately changed on an ideological level. In fact, in true tribalist fashion, people immediately compared the dTAO market to others out there. Solana suddenly became a punching bag. Around dTAO’s release, Solana’s community faced negative press due to word of retail investors losing significantly from Trump’s token, as well as Argentina’s Libra coin being embroiled in scams. Both were hosted on Solana.
The world was critiquing Solana’s ecosystem, and especially how its pump.fun era strengthened the memecoin landscape, with many of its smaller assets taking a hit. Over in Bittensor, the community rejoiced, celebrating how dTAO functioned, and looking down upon Solana’s chaos. As a Content and Community Manager within Bittensor, I saw this regularly across social media. The protocol’s fanbase enjoyed thinking of dTAO as the anti-pump.fun. In other words, a place where fundamentals matter.
Back then, it was also strongly believed that dTAO prices were correlated more tightly to TAO. So the overall impression was anything that’s good for TAO is good for alpha. Nine months in, and that binding is not so clear.
Despite dTAO existing as a product of TAO, there’s no sign that TAO’s price rising will pull dTAO prices up, too. Where in the past, being big into Bittensor meant supporting the coin and the architecture, that isn’t as obvious anymore. You can be a believer in TAO, whilst being critical of its architecture, as its architecture is so tightly bound to alpha.
More complex, still, is that it’s increasingly feeling like subnet fundamentals are not a strong indicator of alpha prices. Many dTAO fans have seen their favourite subnets produce fantastic work, and have even contributed to those achievements, but they haven’t witnessed direct movement within prices. That’s not to say the two are entirely detached, but more so that the ecosystem isn’t inherently investing in subnets which have top incentive mechanisms and output. The first signs were when new subnets launched post-dTAO - people poured money into these projects before the owners had even announced what their plans were.
The space is driven more by hype than people want to admit. The idea of dTAO being an anti-pump.fun was a belief, one being questioned in real time throughout 2025. In fairness to the community, nobody truly knew what Bittensor’s userbase would be like - this is a different space from other blockchains. Memecoins and NFTs and other questionable crypto tactics weren’t possible on the protocol, so it’s reasonable to believe anybody who was big in Bittensor was there for the architecture, the belief in decentralised intelligence, and was part of the collective understanding that this ecosystem was a vision of the future. There was no getting rich quick in Bittensor. And there were few thinking they could.
After all, TAO was the only coin.
dTAO changed the community. Swiftly, people chose their alliances to different subnets, treating them as their main focus. Miners had technically already done this, as most subnets require specific setups and overfitted knowledge to contribute, but retail investors followed suit. You can be a Bittensor maxi and hold more than TAO. The current setup also means you can be a huge fan of one subnet without caring about TAO. Plus, if TAO is of no interest to you, but overall subnet alpha is, then you can technically be big into Bittensor’s architecture without caring about ‘pushing T’.
Bittensor is still viewed as being greater than the sum of its parts, and many come to the ecosystem because of subnets they’ve heard about, but the desire to push subnets forward for the good of the protocol isn’t there in the same way. We’re reaching a point where subnet alpha is getting listed on crypto exchanges, and where teams are looking at methods of getting people engaged with their tools without knowing anything about Bittensor. The collectivist dream is dying. The ecosystem has become significantly more individualist.
Harry Triandis defines individualism as:
‘a social pattern consist[ing] of loosely linked individuals who view themselves as independent of collectives’.
He further notes that where collectivist cultures view the self as an ‘appendage of the ingroup’, individualists see the self as ‘a separate and distinct entity’. Individualists are also more focused on self-reliance, have goals which are more self-motivated, and feel a strong sense of independence.
I’d argue this has begun to happen on Bittensor. Focus is more on these areas. People’s interests are less tied to TAO, and more to specific subnets and their place in them (whether as a miner or validator, or as a holder).
Applying these concepts to the protocol
Mapping definitions of individualism and collectivism onto Bittensor comes with some roadblocks. For starters, the protocol has always been designed with individualist goals in mind. The core mechanism behind Bittensor is that meaningful work can occur when the incentives of multiple parties align. People are taken as individuals first, and then Bittensor maps their personal benefit to the benefits of others. Together, those people are able to build and collaborate, whilst getting rewarded for it.
A conventional collectivist culture would involve people working together without thinking about incentives so obviously. They may still operate because of an incentive (such as belonging, feeling safe, access to resources, or something that positively affects their identity) but what Bittensor does is place a spotlight on those incentives. That’s not new, it’s always been the case.
What’s different is that pre-dTAO everybody’s incentives pointed towards one larger goal - pushing the protocol and TAO along with it. There were underlying non-financial drivers too, like the enjoyment of being within that group, sharing experiences and communicating with likeminded people, but everything still pointed to Bittensor-as-a-whole. Even the way people speak of ‘the protocol’ is a sign of that. The protocol is a noun that doesn’t just represent the architecture, it represents the people within it. Other blockchain ecosystems don’t speak like that. Some thought leaders might, but the average fan doesn’t.
In a dTAO world, the protocol means less than it did, as does TAO. Incentives must still align to instigate change, but that change is more at the subnet-level. Miners, validators, and owners must have an alignment with one-another (as they always did), but the desire to boost Bittensor itself isn’t there anymore. TAO’s price fluctuates in an uncorrelated way to alpha, so there’s no financial incentive to push it if you’re a dTAO fan. And the fact that subnets come with their own architectures, outputs, and end goals means you can be a fan of them whilst drowning out most of the noise about the protocol.
My point isn’t that Bittensor is now an individualist space when before it wasn’t. But rather, that the protocol’s unifying goals beforehand allowed a collectivist space to form whilst still celebrating individualist ideals. Every participant within Bittensor cared primarily for themselves, but that was necessary for incentives to align - the magic happened because those alignments overlapped into another unified and aligned telos, for the protocol to flourish.
That feature is fading. It might be more so that the space is not at a state of frayed independence, but interdependence, where the protocol isn’t as important as its subnets. It’s an age where the subnet reigns supreme. We still live in a time where Bittensor is lesser-known, and where subnets are all fighting for their moment in the spotlight. Currently, there’s still a belief that a subnet’s success will bring more meaningful attention to Bittensor. Soon, one of them will do it. It’ll be fascinating to see whether that really does trigger a boom in the protocol, or whether it’s isolated to that spot.
Navigating the new landscape
Perhaps calling it new is a stretch. We’ve been inching towards this since February 2025. But it’s still a novel period in Bittensor’s history.
It’s good to stress that this might not be inherently bad. dTAO was released as a means of bringing more control and independence to subnets, and adding market dynamics that diversified the space. It’s successfully done this. What we’re witnessing isn’t exactly a failure, it could be chalked up as a feature. In the past, success rested on everybody’s work across the ecosystem - if some subnets were to be attached to scandal, or made public mistakes bringing shame to the space, it theoretically could have damaged everybody’s work. Remember the examples I gave about Solana’s tarnished reputation around February 2025? If those projects shared Solana’s coin as well as its architecture the network might not have recovered so smoothly. If the exact same scandal had happened on Bittensor pre-dTAO it could have seriously damaged everyone’s work. This decoupling means subnets can lead their own narratives more clearly. What is lost in a joint aim is replaced with more freedom.
Along with this, there are still subnets out there who push for collaborations with one another, essentially sewing the fabric back together. The beauty of Bittensor means subnet owners can work more easily with each other because they rely on the same architecture, and teams can still relate to each other because of shared experiences within the protocol. Cross-pollination is still possible, and in the current age is more appreciated than ever.
This is what Bittensor’s social space currently looks like. While incentives don’t span as far and wide as they used to, subnets have more autonomy. Alongside it, nobody who existed before dTAO has forgotten about the culture that existed then - they still adhere to it with collaborations.
So it turns out, this is what happens when TAO is not the only coin.