Decentralized AI (artificial intelligence) protocol Bittensor's native token TAO's rise is accelerating. As of March 24, TAO has increased by about 15% in the near 24 hours, about 30% in the near 7 days, and about 108% this month.
In early March, the price was hovering around 180 dollars, and now it has reached above 350 dollars.
The direct trigger for this sudden rise was a statement on the podcast show 'All-In Podcast' on March 20.
NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang and famous investor Chamath Palihapitiya highly evaluated Bittensor's decentralized AI training model. It is said that Jensen Huang expressed the view that proprietary and open-source artificial intelligence models are complementary, and decentralized innovation will benefit the underlying artificial intelligence technology.
The reason behind this evaluation is the existence of the large-scale language model 'Covenant-72B' developed on Bittensor subnet 3 (τemplar). More than 70 contributors participated in the training using hardware without permission through general internet connections, and the model completed training on 1.1 trillion tokens of data, and was confirmed in a paper published in March 2026, with an MMLU score of 67.1. This is equivalent to Meta's Llama 2 70B.
'Buying' is also spreading to related currencies.
The surge in $TAO price has also had a significant impact on the subnet tokens within the ecosystem. According to CoinGecko's data, the market cap of the entire Bittensor subnet category has grown by about 30% recently, totaling 14.7 billion dollars (about 2200 billion yen). Trading volume has also exceeded 118 million dollars.
Since the launch of dynamic TAO (dTAO) in February 2025, each subnet has its own AMM (automated market maker) and token, and the amount of TAO staked is directly linked to the valuation of the subnet tokens. Therefore, a recursive relationship has been created in which the price increase of TAO itself automatically amplifies the price increase of the subnet tokens.
Among the various subnet tokens, τemplar (SN3), which created the aforementioned Covenant-72B, is leading the category with a monthly growth rate of 477%. Many stocks have monthly returns in the three digits, including OMEGA Labs (SN24) at 490%, BitQuant (SN15) at 214%, and Nova (SN68) at 245%.
Future points of attention such as subnet expansion and ETF conversion
As for the future, the Bittensor network plans to expand the active subnet limit from the current 128 to 256 by the end of this year, and new subnet tokens are expected to appear.
There are rumors that Grayscale's TAO Trust may be converted to a spot ETF, and institutional investors may expand their entry routes to the second half of 2026.
'AI' is the most important keyword and genre in modern times, and the future trends of Bittensor/$TAO, which continues to adopt unique ways of virtual currency and blockchain, are highly watched.
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Compiled by Deniz from CRYPTO-TIMES