Bittensor TAO
Rank #37 by market cap
Last 7 days
CM Profile: Bittensor
Cryptominium Profile. What we have established, measured and written about TAO, and what we have not.
- Measured
- Selling $100,000 on 2 exchange order books lost between 0.06% and 0.30%, on 8 October 2026.
- Its price, recorded by us every day since 9 August 2026.
- Written, with sources
Read from our own records when this page was made. It describes what we know, and is not a view on whether to hold TAO. How each part is worked out
What changed
Week to 8 October- Price down 15.9% since 1 October.
- Circulating supply up 18.2% in 30 days, as CoinGecko reports it.
From our own measurements only, each against the month before. We do not say why a price moves. How this is worked out · Every coin this week
What it actually costs to sell TAO
Selling $100,000 of TAO into each exchange’s resting bids, measured against the mid price:
| Exchange | Lost | Got back | Measured |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kraken TAO/USD | 0.06% | $99,935 | 2026-10-08 |
| Coinbase TAO/USD | 0.30% | $99,703 | 2026-10-08 |
Exchange figures need an account there (and KYC, a permitted country, the tokens already deposited), are before trading fees, and are never averaged with the on-chain figure. Binance is not included: it refuses requests from the region our servers are in. How this is measured →
Watch this number instead of remembering it. A free account keeps TAO on a list, records where it stood the day you added it, and emails you if selling it on these exchanges gets materially harder — one message, not a series. The measurement itself stays public; the account is for being told when it moves without you looking.
What Bittensor is
Bittensor is an attempt to build a market for machine intelligence. The network is divided into subnets, each defined around a task — producing text, generating images, scraping data — where participants submit outputs, other participants score their quality, and TAO is emitted to whoever the scoring rewards. Its monetary design deliberately mirrors Bitcoin's: a twenty-one million cap and periodic halvings.
The premise is that if you can measure the usefulness of a model's output, you can pay for it without any central employer deciding what is good, and competition will push quality up the way mining difficulty pushes hashpower up.
Measuring usefulness is exactly the hard part, and it is where the honest scepticism sits. Scoring mechanisms have been gamed, restructured and re-argued repeatedly, and subnet economics have been reworked by governance more than once. Most of the activity on the network is driven by the emissions themselves rather than by end users paying for the models, which makes it difficult to distinguish a functioning market from a well-designed subsidy. "Decentralised AI" is a category claim considerably ahead of demonstrated production usage, and the frontier models it is implicitly compared against are not built this way.
What Bittensor can do
Selling $100,000 on Kraken lost 0.06% against the mid price, before trading fees. Check your own amount →
Our own measurement · measured 8 October 2026
TAO is controlled by a key the docs call the coldkey, and whoever holds its recovery phrase owns the funds. An account whose balance falls below a tiny minimum, 500 rao (a rao is a billionth of a TAO), is deactivated and what was left in it is destroyed. What a wallet actually is →
Sources: Bittensor docs: wallets and keys, Bittensor docs: money · checked 2 October 2026
TAO can be staked behind a validator, which keeps a share of what the stake earns. Staking swaps the TAO into the separate token of one of the network's subnets at that token's price, and taking it out swaps it back, so what comes back depends on that price.
Sources: Bittensor docs: the network, Bittensor docs: money · checked 2 October 2026
TAO has a hard cap of 21 million. The amount issued with each block halves whenever the total in existence passes a set threshold: the first halving came in December 2025 and took it to 0.5 TAO per block.
Source: Bittensor docs: emissions · checked 2 October 2026
What a coin can do is not a reason to buy it or to sell it. Each answer names its source and the day we read it; where we could not source one, the row is left out. How these are written · Every coin we have written up
Where TAO lives
On Ethereum, Base and BNB Chain, GoPlus's analysis of each contract is read weekly: whether it has a function to block addresses or pause transfers, and whether an owner holds it. That is GoPlus's reading, not ours. Where a token exists on several chains, one copy's settings say nothing about the original coin.
Always verify a contract address against the project's own site before sending anything. Addresses are shown as published by CoinGecko, not as an endorsement — and identical-looking tokens on other chains are the most common way people lose money here.
Price change
Bittensor data synced 4m ago from CoinGecko. Figures shown in USD. This page is market information, not financial advice — and nothing here is a recommendation to buy or sell TAO.