Introducing the Y Combinator of Bittensor – Bitstarter

Contributor: School of Crypto

Imagine all of a sudden you were dropped into the Amazon jungle. You’re surrounded by powerful nimble jaguars, potently venomous frogs, and long, scaly, and ferocious black caimans. What would you do? Bittensor has a similar environment for newcomers looking to build a subnet in its ecosystem. They are essentially prey, and the miners are the deadly predators. Since the competition is so magnified, subnets are very much prone to the miners gaming the system and extracting all the value without making progress on the subnet’s actual initiative.

So how on Earth can a startup on Bittensor have the chops to survive in this jungle? You have to know the jargon, you need to be able to maintain funding, and most of all, the subnet needs to have an effective and sustainable incentive mechanism. The problem is that new subnet owners are drinking out of a fire hose in terms of learning all these nooks and crannies of Bittensor. If only there were a project that could upskill these new teams and give them the know-how in order to survive and thrive. Actually, there is. Introducing the new crowdsourcing Y Combinator of Bittensor, Bitstarter.

Inception

The fine chaps of Bitstarter were featured as guests on Mark Jeffrey’s latest Hash Rate episode. Chris Zacharia, founder of Bitstarter, and Brian McCrindle, lead Engineer, both discussed how the project was born and the overall vision. Both guys have been working with Macrocosmos, the Bittensor group that has multiple subnets such as Iota, Apex, and Data Universe. Chris had the idea of building a project like Bitstarter for a long time now. Having experienced working at Macrocosmos and speaking with newer subnet owners, he knew that there was a bottleneck for up-and-coming teams to sustain operations and thrive. There just had to be a better way of onboarding exciting, talented groups of people that could ultimately build a promising subnet. Teams needed funding, guidance, expertise, feedback, and much more. Unless you were very well-connected, there wasn’t an obvious outlet to get all these things in one place. 

He eventually got on a call with the Bittensor founder himself, Jacob Steeves, to talk about his kickstarter idea. It turns out that Const serendipitously had the crowdfunding idea in place with the substrate code already embedded in the blockchain. He approved of the idea, then Brian was able to incorporate the code into the back end of their website. And just like that, Bitstarter turned from concept into reality.

How does Bitstarter work?

Bitstarter is the go-to startup accelerator platform for any aspiring subnet owner to get proper funding, along with valuable insights from veterans within Bittensor. Need to know how to set up your cold keys and get everything up and running? Well, you can have access to Score founder and team advisor Max Sebti to figure that out. What about strategizing alphanomics for your project? Look no further than spending some time with Ash Wu, who is an expert in dTAO alphanomics. What if you are a team that are experts in coding but don’t really have much experience running a business? Well, there are resources for this type of avatar as well. Successful investors and business men like Rob Greer and James Altucher, who are advisors of Bitstarter, will be advising and assessing teams viability in those respective areas. 

Once a team confides with all these experts within their respective fields, they will make a grand presentation that will be live streamed to the Bittensor community. People can pledge their TAO tokens to help support these teams and in return, receive Alpha tokens. Now we have a reincarnation of Shark Tank right here on our favorite blockchain. May the best teams get funding!

Paving a better way for new teams

Chris emphasized that Bitstarter is all about laying the groundwork before launching. He heard the same story from struggling subnet owners over and over. The theme was how teams were merely piecing together budgets and trying to figure out how to stay afloat instead of innovating and building on their products and services. On Bitstarter, owners will have all these variables ironed out beforehand. Then instead of worrying how to keep the lights on, they can focus solely on making a successful and constantly improving commodity on Bittensor.  

Chris said it best. The internet was just a place for nerdy coders that knew HTML when it first launched. Then the web browser was born, and opened it up for everyone to use. He sees Bitstarter as the ecosystem’s web browser. Now anyone with an idea, plan, and expertise in a burgeoning area, can have the opportunity to build within this exciting incentivized sphere.

Bitstarter is a Place to Connect

Not only will these new teams have access to all these various experts within Bittensor, but they will also have an opportunity to connect with individuals that could help them on their subnet journey. If there’s someone who watched the live stream that can work with the team or give them connections to someone who can help, then this streamlines the onboarding process even further. 

Before this platform, you had to scour Discord servers, cold DM people, and attend conferences in order to make these types of connections. Now teams can completely expose their plans and visions to the community in its entirety.

Introducing the first Bitstarter prospect

Chris and Brian introduce the first team to participate on the platform named Loosh.ai, a Consciousness as a Service Robotics company. The team consists of many knowledgeable professionals that want to scale its intelligence to ultimately provide human level ethics, intentionality, and morality in robots. Loosh has a sleek fully functional website, and is eager to deliver their project and expand its capabilities to another level.

Subnet success on the horizon

Chris and Brian are just two hardcore Bittensor builders that just want this project to succeed. Their passion, expertise, and aura fuels the vision for Bitstarter. They know the type of innovation they accomplished within Macrocosmos, and realize that other teams can experience the same success.

With Bitstarter, teams don’t have to get in the weeds of figuring out all the nuances, technical jargon, unwritten rules of starting, maintaining, and thriving as a subnet on their own. The Bittensor kick starter will take teams from 0 to 1 and make sure they hit the ground running. New subnets will finally be equipped with enough capital and resources to succeed in this wild jungle that is Bittensor.