Exploit Summit: Why You Should Attend and How Much to Budget

Exploit Summit lands at New City Gas in Montreal on September 28 and 29, 2026, gathering the TAO ecosystem for two days of debates, demos, and live workshops.

It was originally planned to take place in the United States, but the event has since been rescheduled and relocated to Montreal.

The conference is organized by Bittensor Commons, a non-profit initiative dedicated to growing the visibility and understanding of the network. The tagline it has chosen for the event is captured in the line “Convene. Compute. Compete.” 

In this piece, we look at what folks should know about the summit before tickets jump in price.

What Exploit Is About

Exploit puts the Bittensor big-brains in one single room. The talks, debates, workshops, and live demos are organized around exposing ideas to scrutiny in public rather than rehearsing them behind closed doors.

Three themes anchor the agenda:

a. Game on For Game-Theoretic AI: Adversarial machine learning competitions powered by free-market economics, running on the world’s largest network of distributed compute.

b. Open Source means Open Debate: Proprietary versus permissionless, black box versus white hat, with the future of compute, data, and software being contested rather than assumed.

c. Exploit the Exponent: Open networks unlock unlimited scale, and the protocol’s growth is being driven by experimentation rather than central planning.

The Speaker Lineup

The first wave of confirmed speakers covers a wide span of the network’s most active builders:

a. Jacob ‘Const’ Steeves, co-founder of Bittensor and now CEO of Affine, an incentive-driven reinforcement learning environment.

b. Max Sebti, co-founder and CEO of Score Technologies, working on computer vision and previously a co-founder of CrunchDAO.

c. Marcus ‘Mog’ Graichen, founder of Taostats and a long-running incubator of community-built tools across the ecosystem.

d. Micaela Bazo, CEO and co-founder of Metanova Labs, which runs NOVA on Subnet 68 as a decentralized drug discovery platform.

e. Steffen Cruz, co-founder and CTO of Macrocosmos, one of the more visible builders of adaptive AI ecosystems on the network.

Several speaker slots remain unannounced, with the organizers hinting further additions in the coming weeks.

Pricing and Timing

Ticket pricing is tiered across three release windows:

a. Early bird: $399, available until May 15 (tomorrow),

b. First release: $499, available until July 14, and

c. Final release: $599, available until September 28.

Early bird tickets close on May 15, after which the price jumps by $100. For attendees already planning to be in Montreal, the early bird window is the cleanest entry point.

Estimated Travel Costs

With TaoDaily’s audience now concentrated heavily across the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom, many of our readers are already evaluating what attending the Exploit Summit in Montreal could realistically cost. 

Using current flight ranges, accommodation pricing near Griffintown, conference access, food, and local transportation as a baseline, the estimates below provide a practical overview of what attendees should expect.

The estimates above include:
a. Exploit Summit early bird ticket access,
b. Round-trip economy flights,
c. Three nights of accommodation near the venue,
d. Food and local transportation, and
e. Miscellaneous travel expenses.

For attendees planning to make the trip, timing matters. The current early bird conference access sits at $399 and closes on May 15, after which pricing increases by $100 in the next release phase.

Flights and hotels also tend to rise steadily closer to the event window, meaning early registration and early booking produce the cleanest overall cost structure for anyone already considering attending.

Conclusion

Exploit Summit is being positioned as Bittensor’s first major flagship event. The protocol’s strength has always come from open competition rather than coordinated central engagements, and the conference is structured to put that approach on display in front of a wider audience.

For builders, investors, and operators who have been following the subnet ecosystem from a distance, two days of demos, debates, and live workshops with the people building it is the most efficient way to compress months of independent research into a single venue. The early bird window closes on May 15, tomorrow.