🦍 State of the Market..

Alt season is here, baby!

The Crypto AI market cap surged to $31.5B this week, marking a whopping 35% increase (!!) over the last two weeks.

Crypto AI is one of the top-performing sectors this month, alongside memes, data availability protocols, and parallelized EVMs.

Leading the charge to Valhalla was TAO, skyrocketing 70% in just two weeks, fueling lots of Bittensor chatter and mindshare on Crypto Twitter.

Several tokens with market caps over $100M saw impressive gains: Delysium (AGI, +46%), Solidus Ai Tech (AITECH, +41%), and Spectral (SPEC, +34%).

Some of this is probably a spillover effect from TAO’s surge as traders move down the spectrum to chase lower-cap AI tokens for higher returns. There is clearly a risk-on sentiment in the market right now.

 📊 Chart of the Week

TAO Emissions: Robust or Worrying?

Here’s a look at Bittensor’s emission schedule:

TAO follows a halvening schedule similar to BTC, with the first halvening set for November 16, 2025.

Right now, 35% of the total TAO is already in circulation (7.5M TAO). By the time of the next halvening, there will be 10.5M TAO in circulation—an increase of 3M TAO, or 40% of the current supply, over the next year.

With the large unlocks we’ve seen in the past year for projects like AltLayer, Arbitrum, Optimism, that has put a dampener on token prices, we can understand the anxiety.

As Emad points out:

There are two ways to look at this—it’s a massive pool of resources Bittensor can use for AI development. If used wisely, Bittensor will thrive. If not… well, we’ve seen what happens.

🌴 AI is ‘Hangry’ for Data!

We’re approaching a wall regarding publicly scrapable data for AI training.

Rob from Volt Capital suggests that the problem may not be creating new data but accessing it.

Platforms like Vana aim to solve this by enabling users to control and monetize their private data through dataDAOs. Users can submit their personal data, such as tweets, posts, and emails, to a dataDAO and be rewarded for it.

Synthetic data is already supplementing AI training. For example, Nous Research used synthetic data to train their Hermes LLMs, and Dria helps AI agents generate synthetic data for similar purposes. As real data becomes scarce, synthetic data will play a bigger role.

There’s also a need for more high-quality, organic data. Sapien AI believes that data labeling will become a major gig economy, with “frontier data”—high-quality, insightful information—becoming increasingly valuable. For instance, a doctor’s diagnostic process is an example of such valuable data.

As we near the limits of scrapable data, demand for private, high-quality, and synthetic data will grow.

🏆 Caught Our Eyes..

Fundraising

• Vana announced a $25M in total funding from notable investors like Coinbase, Paradigm, and Polychain. (Check out our previous research on Vana)

• Grass announces a Series A funding led by Hack VC. Aylo reports on Grass's Series A funding, valuing the company at ~$1B

Project Updates

• Sentient releases their whitepaper on OML for AI entrepreneurship, discussing open vs closed model deployment paradigms

• Chasm Network’s Scout Node Sale sells out in 6 minutes upon launch

• Kuzco's Sam Hogan announces inference.net, a wholesaler of open-source LLM inference tokens

• Hyperspace introduces Play, an AI research product using Groq and Meta's Llama3.1

• Allora Network announces v0.5.0 release with improvements to user experience and network performance

• CrunchDAO announces their token launch on Solana

• BasedAI introduces their privacy-first decentralized AI solution

• Gaia introduces Gaia Domain Names (GDN) for AI projects on the Gaia network

• Prime Intellect teases an upcoming platform for contributing compute power to decentralized training

Incentives / Rewards Programs

• Fluence Network launches a staking program for decentralized cloud computing

Bittensor

• xponentcrisis shares insights from the Bittensor Asia Meetup at Token 2049

• τaonomics announces upcoming Ethereum smart contracts on Bittensor

• Tensorplex Labs introduces Tensorplex Delegate for TAO holders, offering 15% APR and weight assignment features

• Macrocosmos releases V1.0.0 for subnet 25 Protein Folding

• Sami Kassab discusses Ω Focus, a one-click Bittensor mining solution that pays users for focusing on priority tasks

• Seth Bloomberg analyzes Bittensor's network effects and shares his concerns.

Wayfinder

• Kalos demonstrates AIWayfinder's capabilities in creating complex smart contracts He also demos creating a smart contract using AIWayfinder, integrating Chainlink VRF and deploying it to Base

🔥 On X..

No crypto AI companies in YC - can someone fix this please?

Sama outlines the bright future ahead for AI

OpenAI CTO leaves. Is this a sign of trouble in the company?

DMD releases a 26-page report on Bittensor

Matthew Sigel shares Novogratz's explanation of AI and crypto intersection

Jeff Amico explains why decentralized training is the future of AI

Bagel Network discusses prompt-based unlearning techniques for enhancing AI privacy

Fish | Datura demonstrates renting H100 GPUs from Bittensor miners within one minute

Varun Mathur introduces a new agent interface to reduce AI costs