What Is TAO, the Bittensor Token Causing Friction Between Barry Silbert and Bitcoiners?

TAO, the native token of AI-focused blockchain Bittensor, has been causing tension on X between Digital Currency Group founder Barry Silbert and staunch supporters of bitcoin (BTC), the original and largest cryptocurrency.

Author and bitcoin supporter Parker Lewis called Silbert and Raoul Pal, the presenter of The Journey Man podcast, a group of "affinity scammers" for promoting TAO on a recent episode.

Silbert responded by writing: "calling $TAO a scam is such a lazy attack. do better"

Grayscale Investments, one of Digital Currency Group's subsidiaries, runs a Bittensor Trust that currently has around $8 million in assets under management. It also has a spot bitcoin exchange-traded fund (GBTC) with $16.6 billion under management as well as a bitcoin mini trust ETF.

What is TAO?

Silbert sparked the bitcoiners' ire by comparing Bittensor to the Bitcoin blockchain.

"It's just like bitcoin, there was a white paper that turned into code then launched and it has the same token economics," he said in the podcast.

While there are some similarities to BTC in that TAO's supply is capped at 21 million tokens and it goes through block reward halving events, there are also stark differences in terms of the project's ethos and use case.

Bittensor is a decentralized network that merges blockchain technology with machine learning. It was designed to become a peer-to-peer AI market, where users can share and monetize AI models.

Bitcoin was spawned out of the Libertarian cypherpunk era and designed primarily as a peer-to-peer payment method that avoided government-issued currency. In recent years has also emerged a store of value, becoming a mainstay on company balance sheets to mitigate rising inflation.

The TAO token was released two years ago and has experienced extreme volatility, rising to above $700 on two occasions in 2024 before cratering to around $200 both times. It was trading recently around $339.

Bitcoin, meanwhile, has risen from $22,000 since the start of 2023 to as high as $109,000 in January. While it's had its ups and downs, they're not as marked as the plunges typically seen across the altcoin market. Bitcoin is currently priced around $90,000 with a market cap about $1.8 trillion. TAO has a market cap around $2.98 billion, according to data on CoinMarketCap.