TAO Climbs 7% as Native Token Goes Live on Base

Bittensor’s TAO rose roughly 7% on August 20, moving from the mid-$205 range to around $224 to $225, with the token holding near $220 in the sessions that followed. The headline news was native TAO going live on Base, fresh scale on the SN9 training subnet, and a jump in staking yields tied to token outflows.

Native TAO Arrives on Base

ForeverMoney confirmed that native TAO is now live on Base, Coinbase’s Ethereum Layer-2, bridged through Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol with a 1:1 representation of the token.

The asset is tradable on Aerodrome Finance, Base’s largest decentralized exchange, through a TAO-USDC pool eligible for AERO emissions, which hands liquidity providers an added incentive to route TAO flows on-chain.

The launch extends earlier groundwork from Project Rubicon, which brought subnet alpha tokens to Base as liquid-staked xAlpha assets over the same CCIP rails.

Native TAO on a high-activity L2 opens the token to deeper DeFi liquidity, lower fees, and Base’s retail base without users leaving the ecosystem.

Orion-16B Passes 100 Billion Tokens

Subnet 9, run as IOTA by Macrocosmos, is training Orion-16B live, a 16-billion-parameter model spread across three continents on heterogeneous, permissionless hardware.

The run has crossed 100 billion training tokens and continues to improve, ranking among the largest models pretrained this way over the open internet.

IOTA’s data- and pipeline-parallel design lets miners contribute slices of the model rather than full copies, so commodity GPUs including consumer RTX 4090 and 5090 cards can train at scale, with the compute pool targeting 256 GPUs.

This follows Orion-100B, the earlier stage that hit roughly 65% of datacenter training speed on distributed hardware.

Staking Yields Rise on Outflows

Network-wide staking rewards climbed to 17.55%, up 1.17 points week-over-week and the largest move among major proof-of-stake networks tracked in that window.

The increase came from mechanics rather than new incentives: about $9.4 million in staked TAO exited, leaving fixed emissions split across a smaller pool.

The staking ratio has hovered near 77%, with total staked value in the billions. Yields still vary widely by subnet and validator, with root staking lower and steadier and alpha staking higher but carrying alpha-token price risk.