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Crypto, never a dull moment. One of the primary driver's of Bittensor's ecosystem development has dropped a bomb on 'em... causing the issue to trade from $341 at today's highs all the way down to $281.
Covenant (one of the leading subnet groups) is leaving Bittensor, and talkin' shit in the process... 
REGARDING Covenant leaving TAO (courtesy of ChatGPT 5.2 Extended Thinking):
Quote: Yes — that is a serious long-term headline. From the indexed snippets of Covenant’s post, they are not complaining about price action or a minor bug; they are arguing that “decentralized, permissionless AI training” is not actually a Bittensor feature in the way the market believes, and that the network’s permissionless story is contradicted by how it is governed. They go further and say they cannot responsibly raise capital, hire talent, or ask their community to commit resources on top of a foundation that “one person can undermine at will.” That is a direct attack on TAO’s core base-layer thesis.
The reason the market takes that seriously is that Covenant is not a random commentator. Covenant AI says it is building three interconnected Bittensor platforms: Templar for decentralized pre-training, Basilica for decentralized compute, and Grail for decentralized RL post-training. Its own research update says those systems were designed as a full training pipeline, and Templar’s Covenant-72B run was the marquee demonstration that permissionless, distributed training on Bittensor could work at meaningful scale.
In importance terms, Covenant was one of the most important builders in the whole ecosystem, and arguably the single most important one for the decentralized-training narrative. CoinGecko’s March 25 leaderboard had τemplar (SN3) as the largest subnet by market cap at about $134.9M, ahead of Chutes at $132.9M, and its writeup says Templar became “the face of the Bittensor ecosystem” after Covenant-72B. Taostats’ more current snapshot still has SN3 around $92.1M, which keeps it in the top tier. Market summaries also tie TAO’s March surge directly to Covenant-72B, and one report notes the Templar token itself jumped 194% in seven days around the milestone.
Why that mattered so much is that Covenant-72B was not just another subnet update. It was presented as a 72B-parameter model trained across 70+ distributed nodes, with performance roughly comparable to Llama 2 70B, and it became a major reason TAO nearly doubled in March. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang later referenced the achievement, which further amplified its credibility. In plain English: Covenant helped prove that Bittensor might be more than a tokenized emissions game; it might actually be viable decentralized AI infrastructure.
That said, Covenant’s accusation is still an allegation and interpretation, not something the public docs state in exactly that form. What the official Bittensor docs do show is that governance is still transitional: the protocol says it is moving from foundation centralization toward community ownership; in the first stage, a Triumvirate of Opentensor Foundation employees creates proposals, the Senate approves them, and a Triumvirate member must still close them for execution. The docs also say that before this governance model, admin actions required a single privileged sudo key. Separately, subnet-owner docs show owners or root can modify hyperparameters, some functions can be disabled by subnet owners, and Bittensor added rate limits partly to prevent owner abuse against validators. So Covenant’s complaint is directionally plausible, even though the exact “one person” framing is stronger than what the docs themselves spell out.
The closest comparable player is probably Chutes (SN64). By current size it looks larger than Templar — taostats shows roughly $132.5M market cap for Chutes versus about $92.1M for Templar — and Chutes has processed a cumulative 9.1 trillion tokens with daily peaks above 50 billion. That makes Chutes the stronger economic / usage story, while Covenant/Templar was the stronger proof-of-possibility / frontier-training story. If TAO’s narrative rotates away from “decentralized frontier pretraining” and toward “real inference demand and revenue,” Chutes likely becomes relatively more important.
Another major comparable is Targon (SN4). It was around $90M market cap in late March and is positioned around confidential compute rather than open pretraining: SimplyTao describes it as offering secure GPU rentals with Intel TDX, AMD SEV, and NVIDIA Confidential Computing, plus 1,000+ GPUs, sub-50ms latency, and 99% uptime. That makes Targon less central to TAO’s philosophical “permissionless frontier training” story than Covenant, but potentially more legible to enterprise users who care about privacy, attestation, and confidential workloads.
There are other substantial builders too. Macrocosmos’ own materials describe it as one of the largest companies on Bittensor, and it operates across multiple areas rather than hinging on a single symbolic subnet. So Bittensor is not a one-team ecosystem. But Covenant occupied a uniquely valuable slot: it was the team most associated with the claim that Bittensor could coordinate serious large-scale model training over the open internet.
The immediate knock-on effects are already visible inside Covenant’s own stack. CoinGecko shows basilica (SN39) down about 56.6% in 24h and 60.5% in 7d, with market cap around $10.2M, while grail (SN81) was down about 61.4% in 24h and 59.6% in 7d, with market cap around $12.0M. So the market is not only discounting TAO; it is repricing the whole Covenant complex.
The deeper long-term knock-on effect is a governance discount. Under dTAO, the market decides which subnets attract staking and therefore a larger share of daily TAO emissions; subnets with outflows lose that support. That means a governance scare is not merely reputational. If founders, capital, and users believe the base layer is not credibly neutral, that can directly reduce emissions, liquidity, and talent formation for the affected subnets. That is why Covenant’s capital-formation complaint matters so much.
There is also an institutional angle. A big part of TAO’s recent bull case was institutionalization: Grayscale’s Bittensor Trust is explicitly marketed as a regulated way to gain TAO exposure, and large-holder staking narratives such as Yuma’s stated 19% of total TAO supply helped reinforce confidence. If governance now looks more discretionary than rules-based, that does not make TAO uninvestable, but it does justify a lower multiple and tougher diligence from serious capital.
My bottom line: Covenant was probably the most important credibility engine for TAO’s decentralized-training story, even if it was not the only important builder in the ecosystem. Losing confidence from that team does not kill Bittensor outright because Chutes, Targon, Macrocosm, and others still matter. But it does damage the premium valuation that came from believing Bittensor was a credibly neutral base layer for frontier AI builders. If Opentensor responds with real governance hardening, this could eventually be constructive. If not, the market is likely to keep rotating away from the broad “TAO as decentralized frontier AI” story and toward narrower subnets with direct usage, revenue, or enterprise utility.



Post Attachment: down 'n dirty research report on Convenant-comparable subnets and how they may win/lose.
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┼ ··∙ long live the shroomery ∙·· ┼
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