⚠️ Note: Full article by Siam Kidd.
The interesting thing with Bittensor dTAO is that everyone looks like swans from the outside, but under the water, legs are thrashing around hard!
It’s a brand new type of market with new tokenomics and each subnet has their own unique alphanomics.
You can try and forecast high probable futures but then it’s all in the bin when there’s a brand new chain tweak! Max cap of subnets, then not, cap and no deregs, then cap and deregs. And there will be a LOT more. I personally like all the uncertainty. But I spoke with a Billionaire the other day who LOVES Bittensor, but is waiting until it matures a bit and is more predictable before he ploughs in. So yeah, we can all front run him now by just being in. So HODL tight folks!
This constant iteration reminds me of the formation of the United States. All the work Alexander Hamilton and the Forefathers did in the legal system to mould the Constitution etc. dTAO is just like that. Bittensor is still forming its Constitution. But even being a baby, it’s still a project with 100+ use cases whereas most crypto projects have 1 or 2. Not only that, it’s already doing at least $20m per month in revenue. Not bad.
Many subnet owners are like swans too. Striving to balance their comfort zone (coding/AI) with building an actual business with a sound Product Market Fit and actual revenue! Some will do well, many will fail. Personally I think it will end up like the S&P500 where 90% of the value is in just 10% of the subnets. C’est la vie! And unfortunately, much to the purists maxi’s distaste, REVENUE (for the foreseeable future) will be the key live or die metric!
Even myself and DSV are winging it by many aspects. I’ve never owned/ran a hedge fund before. I’m wet behind the ears as much as a brand new subnet owner! dTAO is a fire hydrant of fire for ALL participants!
Our mission is the only thing that hasn’t changed one bit. Be a net positive for the ecosystem and bring fresh eyeballs and a constant flow of money each month into Bittensor. We are doing well on that front. Just need to scale the level of eyeballs and money now. We’ll be holding some big events next year. Hopefully that will move the needle a bit.
However, one thing I feel I/we/DSV are still woefully lacking in, is subnet support! And this bit is crucial because Bittensor is ALL about the subnets! Just like websites are the life force for the World Wide Web.
Originally we thought we could just do simple singular OTC deals and that would help them. Wrong! All that gives is cashflow runway. If not much changes within the subnet, that runway bleeds out and the subnet still has no revenue and no runway 🙁
We then thought that we should do multiple OTC deals to just give a longer runway and that more time would help launch a marketable revenue generating product. Again, not the answer.
We then tried doing multiple OTC deals and helping out more behind the scenes from a business perspective. Again, marginal improvements. Unfortunately, for most subnets, general market participant-buying ends up being less than liq pool injection and their alpha price just bleeds which lowers their emissions which means the team then gets less owner key emissions to pay for OPEX and miners leave because it’s not profitable. Downward spiral of doom that!
We went back to the drawing board and tried something else. We then did the normal OTCs, but kept a big chunk of money to then buy their alpha on market to push and keep the subnet above 1% emissions. That way there’s more runway for the team and also more rewards for their miners so they got better miners. And that actually has shown some positive lasting effects on the subnet. But if we then run out of money to keep buying on market…you guessed it…price then comes back down if there’s no organic buying to sustain the new heightened price levels.
So that brings us to where we are now. A plan that sort of works.
Moving forward, we are going to focus more on longer term alignment. So OTCs, direct cashflow runway lengthening, LOTS of on market buying to hopefully maintain a minimum of 2% emissions to attract better miners and getting properly stuck into the business side of the subnet. Mark and I have both run and scaled lots of different businesses, so maybe getting our hands in the pie may help. We’ll see!🤞
Again, we are all fumbling around in the dark here and everything is an experiment. Data/results is king here. We will Do, Fail, Learn & Pivot as fast as we can. It’s the mantra I live by.
Subnet 71 is our first proper foray into incubating a subnet for a few months behind the scenes before buying a subnet slot and launching. And I’m super stoked for their launch on Monday and how things go. But despite all of this, I’ve said to the team a billion times that everything we do/done will be completely redundant and wasted…..UNLESS THEY BRING IN REVENUE and deliver value back to alpha holders! And they need to bring in revenue WITHIN the first 3 months. If not, we will have run out of allocated funds for them and the normal inflationary dTAO forces will bring price and emissions back down…
We have 2 more subnets we are going to try and incubate and be more active in, in parallel. But regardless, all of this will be fun whether we succeed or not! Either way, I look forward to looking back in a year and seeing how much has changed. Anywho, word waffle essay over. Stay safe folks!
God I love Bittensor!
Be the first to comment