Vincent Rapido’s Journey From ‘Skepticism’ to Contributing on Bittensor

Ventura Labs featured Vincent Rapido, co-founder of Miners Union Validator and creator of TaoSwap, reflecting on Bittensor’s evolution over the past two years. He recounted arriving in late 2023 as a skeptical French full-stack developer who initially believed the network was a scam because miners had to buy $TAO to participate.

Although he never launched a subnet, he became a key infrastructure contributor through Miners Union and TaoSwap, building a reputation that began with an exploit bounty. The conversation also explored how he started mining TAO, the founding of Miners Union, and his perspectives on Root Reborn, Conviction, weight copying, and Bittensor’s future.

Snippets From the Episode

The interview moved through his path into the network, the crew that became Miners Union, the philosophy behind TaoSwap, and the specific mechanism debates shaping Bittensor today.

1. First impression was outright skepticism: He initially refused to dive in because proof-of-work registration was disabled and the only way to mine was to buy $TAO. He called it a scam, a Ponzi, and only revisited after the price spiked from $30 to $180.

2. First subnet he mined was SN27, chosen because it was cheapest to register: SN27, was the first subnet picked then because newer subnets required less $TAO to enter, and he did not want to burn his limited capital.

3. Won a 50 TAO bounty on SN27 by inventing a Hashcat-based proof-of-work: A miner had exploited the subnet by modifying kernel binaries to claim 9 billion fake GPUs and 9 petabytes of RAM.

He spent his entire Christmas vacation solving it, and his fix required miners to compute real GPU work to prove their hardware.

4. Met his eventual co-founders through the SN27 mining chat: The crew that became Miners Union (four prior miners including well-known figures across the ecosystem) originally met by helping each other in Discord rather than competing.

That collaborative dynamic became the founding culture of Miners Union.

5. Miners Union was born because validators were not running the code: After joining a subnet dev team and getting frustrated with how slowly validators updated their code, he discovered the reason was that most validators were just copying each other’s weights.

Miners Union was built as an explicitly honest validator alternative.

6. Alex’s sTAO idea was the breakthrough that shaped the validator: The co-founder proposed letting stakers vote for weights, which they implemented before official dynamic TAO launched.

The experiment proved sTAO did not work because everyone voted for their own subnets, but it gave the Opentensor Foundation invaluable data before the actual dTAO rollout.

7. TaoSwap was built because existing tools were either too slow or too complex: He noted that Taostats had noticeable API delays, and TaoApp was insanely powerful but overwhelming for casual users.

TaoSwap was designed to be fast, fluid, and simple, funded by the fees Miners Union Validator generates.

8. Weight copying is still “poison” but has become the subnet owner’s problem to fix: Thanks to Child Hotkey, primary validators with enough stake can now update code quickly without waiting for consensus.

Weight copying still exists but no longer slows down subnet iteration meaningfully.

9. Validating all 128 subnets is financially impossible: Chutes (SN64) alone requires 16 H200 GPUs to validate properly, which is more than the rewards would ever cover.

Even with Claude Code and Codex slashing developer time by orders of magnitude, hardware costs remain the binding constraint.

10. Root Reborn will restore validator due diligence to what it was pre-dTAO: Validators who invest in bad subnets will lose APY, which creates market pressure against the backdoor-deal culture that used to exist.

Weight-for-payment schemes will resurface briefly but will not last because dishonest validators will lose stakeholders.

You Can Become Someone

The interview showed that meaningful impact on Bittensor does not require launching a subnet. The guest arrived as a skeptical developer with no crypto reputation, earned recognition through an exploit fix and consistent infrastructure contributions, and went on to build Miners Union Validator and TaoSwap.

His advice is for enthusiasts to contribute at their own scale, review and submit PRs, and build work people can trust. In Bittensor, credibility is earned through real contributions, not institutional backing or deep pockets.

➛ Watch the Full Interview Below