Const Unveils Bittensor’s Most Aggressive Governance Roadmap Yet

The opening of this week’s Bittensor Novelty Search was unusual, because instead of running through subnet highlights, Jacob ‘Const’ Steeves used the stage to walk through the network.

He discussed what is essentially (Opentensor Foundation) OTF‘s exit roadmap (noting Conviction’s launch in three days, with chain governance this summer), and a stack of protocol-level upgrades designed to harden the network’s economics before OTF formally dissolves.

Every change discussed serves the same goal of pushing governance, ownership, and sense-making out of OTF and into the protocol itself, intelligently and without ripping anyone’s business model out from under them.

The Protocol Changes Landing in the Next 90 Days

The roadmap covered eight specific changes, most of which ship within weeks rather than quarters:

a. Conviction Launches Tuesday: The chain upgrade enables conviction accrual immediately, though actual subnet takeovers require a follow-up sudo transaction to flip on. 

Takeover trigger sits at 10% conviction in a subnet older than one year, with hyperparameters finalized in the published proposal.

b. Chain Governance Arrives This Summer: Initial implementation is already complete, designed as a track-based system that moves fast on routine items and slowly on structural ones.

The above documentation exists for anyone who wants to read through how it will work mechanically.

c. Root Yield May Be Replaced By Root Funds: The proposal to remove root yield outright generated strong pushback, so the team is now exploring root funds instead, where root validators function as managed investment vehicles into the subnet ecosystem rather than passive stake earners.

d. Subnet Emission Toggles: Subnet owners will soon be able to turn off emissions in their own subnets, and once governance is live, proposers will be able to vote to disable emissions on subnets clearly abusing the system.

e. Slashing Primitives Ship in June: Building on extended tempos (configurable up to a week starting in two weeks), slashing will let owners punish bad miner behavior over longer time windows rather than only rewarding good behavior.

f. Shorting and Longing Roll Out Gradually This Year: Built by Yuma, the mechanism allows traders to take the opposite side of a position by borrowing from the pool. The team plans to introduce leverage carefully and scale it as the system proves stable.

g. TaoFlow V2 is Live: Built with the Tao5 team, V2 intelligently subtracts subnet subsidies from emission calculations, closing the loophole that lets teams game flow through self-purchase strategies.

More details below:

h. Registrations Now Count as Inflow: Previously treated as buy-and-burns, subnet registrations now boost a subnet’s measured inflow, which directly benefits subnets running active mining processes.

With Conviction, TaoFlow V2, and burned root yield combined, Bittensor moves toward net deflation at a sum-of-subnets value of 5, with the protocol already generating more burned revenue than Solana ($SOL) or Ethereum ($ETH) when measured purely against root yield.

What This Really Means

The throughline across all eight changes is decentralization, both in the protocol and in the organization stewarding it. OTF is actively dismantling itself, with Atlas at Crucible, Medulla spinning out, Macrocosmos already independent, and Nucleus members migrating to other companies.

Const noted that Canadian counsel flagged the dissolution intent as legally unusual, since CEOs are not supposed to want to destroy their own companies. The Bittensor design has always pointed at this moment though, and the next 90 days are when the protocol absorbs the last functions OTF still performs.

The next few months will decide whether the handoff lands cleanly or whether the complexity Const himself has flagged opens up new exploit surfaces. Either way, the roadmap is now public, dated, and shipping.