Asia Morning Briefing: Bittensor’s dTAO Shows a Retail Path to AI Exposure Beyond Robinhood’s SPVs

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Robinhood got all kinds of attention earlier this year when it claimed to be able to offer its retail users exposure to OpenAI’s growth story via tokenized shares backed by a special purpose vehicle.

Counsel for OpenAI, has warned that these tokens do not constitute equity and claimed that the whole thing is unauthorized, which could potentially mean it could be a risky investment for the token holders.

This gets at a bigger question of investor access. The hottest AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, remain firmly private, their growth captured by venture capital funds and strategic backers like Microsoft or Google.

The institutional investors get it all, and retail investors are locked out, forced to either buy into Big Tech equities like Nvidia, or hope that structured products like SPVs deliver something resembling exposure.

Enter Bittensor.

In February 2024, the decentralized AI network rolled out its Dynamic TAO (dTAO) upgrade, which is aiming to turn staking into something closer to venture capital, where everyone gets a chance to have access to yield.

Instead of passively validating the root subnet, TAO holders now allocate directly to subnets, each with its own on-chain AI startup, and receive “alpha” tokens in return. These tokens reflect the performance and demand of the subnet, and staking decisions determine which projects earn a share of the network’s emissions. It’s a simple market-driven incubator where value is rewarded only if it is created.

"The subnets form an ecosystem within an ecosystem, where performance and utility are rewarded, stacking opportunities both through staking returns and alpha token appreciation," explained ‘Zerobit’, CEO of Talisman, a wallet that’s part of the dTAO ecosystem, during a recent panel on AI at Taiwan Blockchain Week.

Two subnets illustrate why this matters. Ridges (SN62) is a coding agent that has already outperformed Anthropic’s Claude 4 on SWE-Bench, an industry-standard test of code generation.

In just weeks, decentralized miners competing for emissions pushed Ridges’ accuracy above 80%, surpassing what a heavily funded centralized tech company delivered with hundreds of millions in capital.

Crucially, it achieved this while spending just tens of thousands of dollars on compute, leveraging Bittensor’s ecosystem of shared subnets and proving the thesis of decentralized AI holds water.

Another one of those is Chutes (SN64), the network’s serverless compute backbone. Think of it as a decentralized AWS for AI workloads: It processes billions of tokens daily, scales models in seconds, and undercuts centralized providers by up to 85% on cost.

Chutes also hosts DeepSeek’s large language models on HuggingFace, making it the largest decentralized provider of open-source inference at scale.

For retail investors, it could provide a compelling alternative. SPVs offer synthetic claims on private companies, riddled with potential legal and liquidity risk. Subnet staking, by contrast, is permissionless, performance-based, with results that can be verified on-chain.

"Where most crypto projects lock growth behind insider deals, Bittensor’s dTAO opens investment access from day one, letting them ride the growth in the value of the alpha token,” explained Brad Fuller of Bittensor.ai, a subnet staking data portal, during the same panel at Taiwan Blockchain Week. “It’s an on-ramp for anyone to join the ownership class and share in AI’s growth.”

The winners attract stake, grow emissions, and compound into stronger projects. With Anthropic and OpenAI still locked away from public markets, Bittensor could be one of the few ways for everyday investors to ride AI’s upside without waiting for Wall Street’s blessing.

While TAO may not have the similar pull like flashy Big Tech equities, subnet staking is becoming easier through new wallets, and with heavyweights like DCG’s Barry Silbert circling the ecosystem – who has already called it a protocol as important as bitcoin – this could provide a potential opportunity for those who might go down the rabbit hole of alternative investment options within the AI sector.

Market Movement

BTC: Bitcoin barely budged after the Fed’s quarter-point cut, holding at $116,851 as traders weighed Powell’s risk management framing against a cautious dot plot.

ETH: Ethereum saw stronger follow-through, climbing to $4,603.60 with a 6% weekly gain, reflecting renewed appetite for higher-beta names amid expectations of back-to-back cuts in October and December.

Gold: Deutsche Bank has lifted its 2026 gold forecast to $4,000/oz., citing strong central bank demand, a weaker dollar, and political uncertainty around the Fed’s independence, after gold’s 41% year-to-date surge past $3,700.

S&P 500: The S&P 500 slipped 0.1% to 6,600.35 after the Fed’s expected rate cut, as Powell signaled it was not the start of an extended easing cycle.

Elsewhere in Crypto

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• Crypto Exchange Kraken Sees Handful of Senior Execs Depart: Source (CoinDesk)
• DeFi Development acquires nearly $15 million in SOL, pushing Solana holdings above 2 million tokens (The Block)