The Bittensor ecosystem opened 2026 with a key milestone as Subnet 24, Quasar, successfully raised its full 400 TAO target via Bitstarter, Bittensor’s on-chain crowdfunding platform. The raise closed ahead of schedule, attracting 66 early backers and signaling strong conviction around decentralized long-context AI.
Built by SILX AI, Quasar focuses on one of the hardest problems in modern AI: long-context memory. Large language models struggle as context length grows, with costs rising sharply and performance degrading. Quasar is designed to push past this limitation by incentivizing miners to develop models that can reason over extremely large inputs such as full books, large codebases, and long-running agent histories.
Quasar’s near-term roadmap includes a mainnet launch for mining and validation in this January, followed by the release of a two-billion-parameter foundation model trained for extreme context lengths. The team also plans reinforcement learning pipelines to extend existing open-source models and, later, multimodal evaluations and APIs to support revenue generation.
The project is backed by investors, including DSV Fund, and is positioned as core infrastructure for agent-based AI systems that must retain memory over long horizons.
The raise also highlights Bitstarter’s growing role in the ecosystem. Launched in late 2025, Bitstarter provides subnet teams with advisory support, secure on-chain fundraising, and a clear path to launch. Having carried out its first live raise for Alphacore, subnet 66, Bitstarter is cementing its unique position within the ecosystem. For Quasar, contributors exchanged TAO for alpha tokens at discounted rates with vesting, while a portion of the raise was immediately recycled into subnet emissions to stimulate early activity.
Quasar’s successful funding reflects a maturing Bittensor community that is increasingly willing to support technically ambitious subnets with long-term vision. As Bittensor continues to evolve into a marketplace for specialized AI capabilities, long-context intelligence is emerging as a critical layer.
With funding secured, the SILX AI team is now focused on execution as Quasar prepares to go live on mainnet. The raise stands as a clear signal that decentralized AI infrastructure is entering a more serious and scalable phase.
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