Why Barry Silbert Chose Bittensor

Barry Silbert has not been subtle about how he feels about Bittensor.

The Digital Currency Group (DCG) founder has called it the thing he has been “most excited about since Bitcoin” and describes Bittensor as the “World Wide Web of intelligence.”

More recently, he called it one of the most ambitious and interesting projects in crypto, while Yuma has said decentralized AI could ultimately be as transformative as Bitcoin.

Those are big statements coming from Barry Silbert. He started buying Bitcoin in 2012 when it was trading below $10, and later built one of the earliest institutional vehicles for Bitcoin through Grayscale. More recently, his long-standing conviction in Zcash also looked increasingly prescient as ZEC surged this year. So the interesting question is what he saw in Bittensor that convinced DCG to go this deep.

Evan Malanga, Chief Revenue Officer at Yuma, gave answers during a recent conversation with Jesus Martinez. After ChatGPT exploded, DCG was looking at what it should build next. Barry asked Evan to go deep into Bittensor and come back with an answer: is there something here worth building around?

By the end of 2024, that research had turned into Yuma, a DCG company built entirely around Bittensor.

Bittensor Looked Different From Most AI Crypto Projects

According to Evan, DCG saw something familiar in Bittensor. Bitcoin created money that did not need a government. Zcash pushed the same cypherpunk thinking toward financial privacy. Bittensor was attempting something similar with AI by creating an alternative to a future where a handful of companies control the models, infrastructure, and enormous amounts of information people share with AI systems.

Evan recalled watching the network expand from effectively one subnet to 32, without a massive backer spending billions to attract teams. Devs were joining on their own, experimenting and starting businesses around the protocol. For DCG, that organic activity was an important reason it developed more conviction in Bittensor.

That also helps explain Barry Silbert’s “World Wide Web of intelligence” comparison. The bet is not that one Bittensor company will defeat OpenAI. It is that an open network could allow thousands of teams to build different forms of intelligence, infrastructure, and AI services on the same underlying economy.

The Bet Now Depends on Subnets Becoming Real Businesses

This was probably the most important part of Evan’s conversation with Jesus. For Bittensor to work, subnets eventually need to become successful businesses outside the Bittensor ecosystem.

Evan used Chutes (SN64) and Score (SN44) as examples. The ideal future is one where a customer uses Chutes for AI inference or Score for computer vision because the product is good, without needing to know anything about the blockchain. Bittensor simply sits underneath the product, helping make it cheaper, faster, or more competitive.

That is increasingly what Yuma is looking for too. Its accelerator now works with teams that already have their own ideas and, in some cases, established products. Evan said Yuma is speaking with more mature enterprise businesses, including companies from AI and entirely different industries that are exploring whether Bittensor can improve what they already do.

Meet Yuma Group’s Growing Portfolio of Bittensor Subnets

DCG Is Treating This as a Long Bet

Evan expects Bittensor’s move toward broader adoption to take time, possibly seven to ten years. Better exchange support, easier access to subnets, more mature businesses and products that reach customers outside crypto will not all happen at once.

And DCG appears comfortable building through that process. Yuma has continued expanding through major TAO price swings, growing from roughly a dozen employees to around three dozen and developing several business lines around the network.

That helps explain why Barry Silbert’s conviction has remained so strong. Bittensor is still attracting builders, and the network gives them a way to compete, improve their products, and potentially turn that work into real businesses. The strongest proof will come when those businesses start winning customers on the strength of the product itself, with Bittensor simply powering the infrastructure behind the scenes.

That is the future DCG appears to be positioning for, and its involvement has only grown since Barry first sent Evan to figure out whether Bittensor was worth building on.

➛ Watch the full conversation below.