Bittensor isn’t going anywhere. Neither is Const.

Cast your mind back to April 10. That was the morning Covenant AI’s Sam Dare quietly sold 37,000 TAO (about $10 million) and exited the network without a word of warning. TAO fell as much as 25% in hours, liquidations piled up, and the community had one word for it: *rug.*

The whole episode exposed a structural soft spot Bittensor had been carrying for years. A subnet owner could build trust, accumulate a position, and then drain it, with no one able to see it coming.

Although it has been in Bittensor’s codebase since the launch of dTAO, that wound is a major reason Conviction exists. And on May 31, the network’s co-founder used it to send the loudest possible message in the opposite direction.

Const puts his skin in the game

Jacob Steeves (Const), OpenTensor Foundation co-founder, locked the holdings in his public wallet (5GH2aUTMRUh1RprCgH4x3tRyCaKeUi5BfmYCfs1NARA8R54n) under Conviction, on a perpetual basis.

That wallet is no small thing. On-chain, it’s the network’s #2-ranked account, holding ~279,000 TAO (about $70 million) at current prices ~$250, spread as stake across dozens of subnets.

Here’s the interesting part: perpetual doesn’t mean “locked for a long time.” It means the lock never counts down on its own. For Const to ever touch those tokens again, he’d have to actively call unlock_stake and then sit through a roughly 365-day decay before ~90% becomes withdrawable, every step of it visible to the market in advance. He has handed himself the slowest possible exit and shown everyone the door he’d have to use.

Read more about Conviction below:

Why Const’s lock is bullish

Conviction was built to make a silent exit impossible. Const locking first turns that abstract guarantee into a concrete one, and it’s bullish for three reasons:

• Sell pressure comes off. That’s $70M that can’t be dumped on a whim, in a network where available liquid float is already small relative to circulating supply. Less tradeable TAO, more demand.

• Incentives align. The person with the most influence over the protocol is now tied to its longest horizon. If Bittensor wins, so does he, and there’s no quiet back door out.
• The floor for “commitment” moves. When the co-founder locks everything, perpetually, it screams “I’m long-term,” which is backed on-chain. Every other owner is now measured against that bar.

It’s the cleanest possible answer to the Covenant question: can a big holder just leave? For this wallet, not without telling you a year in advance.

The ripple

Const wasn’t the only lock that’s currently happening. Other large holders and subnet owners are converting big positions to Conviction, with a meaningful share of some subnets’ staked supply now locked.

Verify it yourself

You don’t have to take anyone’s word for it; every Conviction lock is publicly auditable on the Conviction tab of the holder’s account on taostats, the network’s official explorer. Also, ecosystem tools like SubnetRadar are tracking Conviction on-chain.

The takeaway

Crypto is full of conviction you can’t measure. Bittensor just built a place to put it, and the co-founder showed up big. Whether you hold TAO, run a subnet, or you’re only here for the decentralized-AI race, the signal is hard to misread: the people building this network are locking themselves to it. Const went first.

The interesting question now is who follows, and the chain will tell you.