Top AI Blockchain Bittensor's Subnets Surge Past $500M Market Cap

Bittensor’s TAO token is up over 40% over the last week, driven by the success of the protocol’s subnet ecosystem and the launch of dynamic TAO (dTAO) in February.

The total market capitalization of Bittensor subnets crossed $500 million yesterday, April 21, a 100x increase from its $4 million launch market cap on Feb.14, according to Backprop Finance.

The TAO token is rallying as a result, and is the second best performer in the top 100 altcoin market over the last seven days.

Bittensor is an open-source, blockchain-based protocol designed to connect AI and machine learning models. Its subnets represent decentralized commodity markets on Bittensor’s blockchain network, per the project’s official website.

The Bittensor network’s dynamic TAO model furthers the decentralization of Bittensor’s root network, and allows each subnet launch in the network to function as its own automated market maker (AMM) with an automatically assigned native token.

Through the dTAO model, the valuation of a subnet is determined by the amount of TAO that users have staked into the subnet’s currency reserves.

The only subnet that does not have its own currency is the root subnet, also known as subnet 0 (SN-0). The root subnet is responsible for determining the proportion of the network's block emissions to be distributed to each subnet. These emissions are distributed in the form of TAO and then injected into each subnet’s TAO reserve.

Joseph Jacks, the founder of OSS Capital and co-founder of Bittensor acceleration group, Latent Holdings, praised Bittensor’s developer scene and use case.

“There is no single permissionless network in the world with remotely the level of development activity and real world useful output as Bittensor produces today..not even close,” he told The Defiant.

Top subnets

Apart from SN-0, the largest subnet is Chutes. Chutes, or SN-64, is valued at a $95.7 million market capitalization, according to TAO.app. The CHUTES token is up 118% over the last month to $0.35, from $0.16 on March 21.

Chutes provides serverless and decentralized AI compute, which it claims allows users to “deploy, run and scale any AI model in seconds.” The most popular public model offered through Chutes is the popular Chinese large-language model (LLM), DeepSeek v3. DeepSeek v3 through Chutes has over 31 million runs over the last seven days, per data from Chutes.

The subnet is being developed by Rayon Labs, which is also behind SN-19, Nineteen, and recently launched SN-56, Gradients.