January 3, 2021
Testnet Launched
Bittensor's first testnet goes live, laying the groundwork for a decentralized incentive mechanism for machine intelligence.
The Bittensor Story
A History of
Decentralized AI.
From testnet to the defining infrastructure shift of the decade. Every milestone on Bittensor's path to mainstream adoption.
2021
The Founding & Early Testnets2023
Mainnet Launch2023
Official Mainnet & Opentensor Foundation Launched
Bittensor's mainnet goes live and the Opentensor Foundation is established to steward the network's growth and governance.
2024
Ecosystem Growth & Expansion Experiments2024
Subnetworks Launched
Subnetworks launched without tokens, unlocking new use cases for Bittensor and exponentially scaling the network's available compute power.
2025
The Subnet Explosion & Economic UpgradesFebruary 13
Dynamic TAO (dTAO) Upgrade
The dTAO upgrade launches, enabling each subnet to have its own token and establish its own incentive model.
July
Yanez (SN54) Raises $900K Seed
Yanez, focused on adversarial compliance testing, raises a $900K seed round.
September
Templar (SN3) Begins Covenant-72B
Templar launches the distributed training run for its massive Covenant-72B model.
October
Chutes (SN64) Tops OpenRouter
Chutes becomes the #1 open-source AI inference provider on OpenRouter, handling over 40 billion tokens a day.
October
Ridges (SN62) Beats Centralized Giants
Ridges AI coding agents beat massive centralized competitors like Anthropic's Claude and Cursor on the SWE-bench benchmarks.
November
Taoflow Economic Upgrade
The Taoflow economic upgrade activates, making it possible for underperforming subnets to become delisted and increasing pressure on subnets to add value to the network.
November
Synth (SN50) Achieves 20x ROI
Synth successfully turns $3,000 of initial capital into $60,000 (a 20x ROI) on Polymarket using token-based incentives to improve betting outcomes.
November
Score (SN44) Enterprise Deals
Score secures computer vision deals with Reading, England, Football Club and AVIA's 3,200 gas stations.
December 10
Targon (SN4) Releases TVM
Targon releases the Targon Virtual Machine (TVM), offering fully confidential enterprise compute at a fraction of the cost of AWS & Azure.
December 15
First-Ever TAO Halving
Bittensor executes its first-ever halving, reducing the daily block reward from 1 TAO to 0.5 TAO.
December
MEV Shield Launches
The MEV Shield launches, introducing an encrypted mempool that prevents DEX front-running by trading bots.
2026
Breakthroughs & Mainstream Institutional AdoptionJanuary
Score (SN44) Launches Manako Vision AI
Score officially launches its Manako Vision AI product.
January
Nemotron Nano 3 Ranks 5th on OpenRouter
The Nemotron Nano 3 model deployed on Chutes (SN64) ranks as the 5th fastest model on all of OpenRouter, only beaten by specialized LPU hardware.
February
Subnet Cap Expansion Initiated
Due to high demand from the community for subnets, plans are initiated to expand the total Bittensor subnet cap from 128 to 256.
March 10
Decentralized LLM Beats Meta's LLaMA
Templar (SN3) completes the largest decentralized LLM training run in history, beating Meta's LLaMA-2-70B at a fraction of the cost. The achievement is recognized by NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang and Chamath Palihapitiya.