🦍 State of the Market..

The Crypto AI market sits at $26.6B, marking a slight 0.8% dip from last week. Most crypto sectors stayed quiet, with no big moves to shake things up.

TAO is holding strong, now at $562.

Bittensor is making waves beyond the charts. Mogmachine, the founder of Taostats and Corcel, gave a talk at Google Toronto, which even caught the attention of YouTube co-founder Steve Chen, who reposted it! With mindshare on the rise, the market is taking note.

NMT and QUBIC both took hits of -18% and -10% respectively this week, likely feeling the hangover from their late-September rallies (~30%) as speculators dial back the risk.

A quick recap of the past 30-Days:

TAO, VIRTUAL, COMAI, SNS, ENQAI were the top 30D performers in our Crypto AI token watchlist

On the other hand, NOA, AR, AGIX, OCEAN and AKT were the worst 30D performers. Still, it’s not a bad showing since AKT is only down 2%.

 📊 Chart of the Week

Graphite AI: More Proof for TAO Incentives

The chart above tracks miner scores from Graphite AI’s Subnet 43.

And it’s clear: the miners are leaving commercial models in the dust for graph optimization. The gap is growing wider, with the green line at the top representing the miner models, while the blue line below is the commercial benchmark struggling to keep up.

Subnet 43 was built to tackle graphical problems with finesse. Think of it as the ultimate solver for the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP)—a classic challenge of finding the shortest possible route through a set of cities and back again.

Potential use cases include planning travel itineraries or mapping out all the must-visit cafes in your area.

The chart below shows miner models’ upward trajectory over time. In September, they outperformed commercial models by ~1.8%. By October, that lead stretched to ~2.5%.

Considering Graphite AI’s Subnet 43 has only been around for two months, this progress is impressive. They’ve scaled from tackling graph problems with just 250 nodes to handling challenges with 2,500–3,000 nodes. It’s a testament to how TAO incentives can motivate participants to reach new heights.

🌴 AI Agents are the Onchain Future

There’s a buzz building around AI agents taking over the bulk of on-chain transactions. Kalos (Parallel, Wayfinder) is making a bold claim: within a year, 90% of all transactions could be agent-driven.

6079.ai or AI Layer Labs and Wire Network just announced their merger to make this future a reality.

6079.ai’s Proof of Inference Protocol (PoIP) aims to deliver robust verification and security for decentralized AI inference. Meanwhile, Wire Network is building a gasless, interoperable blockchain network tailored specifically for AI agents.

Both believe that AI agents will soon dominate on-chain activity and are laying the infrastructure to make it happen. 

Their first big move? A universal DEX that lets AI agents trade assets across chains without gas fees. But how can a network run without gas fees, you ask?

Ken’s got the answer: it all comes down to network ownership. Unlike the usual setup where users buy gas tokens (think SOL or ETH), Wire Network is flipping the script. Instead, users can purchase nodes and set the gas prices for transactions flowing through them.

If a node owner whitelists a specific smart contract, they’ll cover the gas fees for users interacting with that contract.

Will we see more M&A activity in the Crypto AI space? Time will tell.

🏆 Caught Our Eyes..

Fundraising

• VanEck launches a $30M early-stage fund focusing on the intersection of fintech, crypto, and AI, with a special interest in the application layer

• OpenGradient raises $8.5M in seed funding to build a decentralized platform for secure open-source AI with notable investors like a16z, Coinbase, and Foresight ventures.

Bittensor Spotlight

• Mogmachine's full talk at the Google Toronto office about the Bittensor incentive mechanisms and community

• Bittensor's impact extends beyond AI development: Subnet 2 Omron makes strides in ZK proof generation.

• Mark Jeffrey suggests Bittensor could be the "Third Great Coin" alongside Bitcoin and Ethereum, citing Arca newsletter analysis.

• Greg Osuri highlights how Bittensor and Akash work together but rejects the idea of Akash becoming a Bittensor Subnet

• Omega Focus is a simple way to earn Bittensor by completing tasks on your computer; they’ve distributed $7.5k USD worth of TAO

• Masa shares statistics and miner earnings information for their Bittensor Subnet 42, which provides a network for real-time, structured data for AI

• We found a comprehensive list of applications powered by Bittensor subnets

ALPHA ALERT: if you want to stay up-to-date on the Bittensor ecosystem, TAO Times is our favourite sibling newsletter to follow!

Project Updates

• GM.ai provides a Q3 recap, highlighting the launch of their GM wallet, the introduction of Multi Agent, their Airdrop season 2, and their telegram app crossing 2M+ users

• Based AI explains the delay in their burn launch due to contract sniping, ensuring a fair launch for users

• Denarii Labs announces a dedicated accelerator with Wire Blockchain, opening applications for DeAI projects looking to launch tokens

Incentive / Rewards Programs

• Sapien AI launches the Sapien Bounty program, offering USDC to complete challenges to build a network of human data labellers

• Space and Time launches "Gigabrain's Mission to Space", a new community quest with daily tasks for participants.

• Theoriq announces their incentivized testnet, inviting users to test AI Agents and earn rewards

• Kaisar Network opens the waitlist for their Kasiar ZeroNode, teasing rewards for early access

Arweave

• AO / Arweave announces a major upgrade to their AO Operating System, releasing AOS 2.0

• Kyle_13 shares Arweave/AO Weekly Highlights, including $DAI deposits and Arweave Ecosystem Endowment Fund milestone

🧠 Open Source Corner

It’s a big week for AI in the Nobel world.

The 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics went to John J. Hopfield and Geoffrey E. Hinton, recognizing their groundbreaking use of physics tools to lay the foundations for deep neural networks and modern day machine learning. Congrats to both of them!

But not everyone’s thrilled. There’s been some online chatter about whether they deserved the physics prize, given that their work leans more toward AI than traditional physics—leaving some other heavyweight contenders out in the cold.

Meanwhile, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to David Baker (for AI in computational protein design), Demis Hassabis (DeepMind co-founder) and John M. Jumper (AlphaFold creator)

Looks like even the Nobel committees are hopping on the AI hype train.

🔥 On X..

Fraction AI announces breakthrough to improve model performance

JJ lays out the bull case for Bittensor subnets

Anand Iyer shares insights on distributed training methods

a16z: Building the AI brain

A 250-page report on Edge AI

Tensorplex Labs cover Subnet 2 Omron in detail