Decentralized AI Platform Bittensor Gains 15% Amid Unconfirmed Grayscale Rumors

Decentralized AI project Bittensor has seen its native token, TAO, gain 15% in the past day. It seems to have been helped along by an unconfirmed rumor that longstanding digital asset manager Grayscale plans to register a new trust that tracks the token. But that's not the only recent news for the project.

At the time of writing on early Thursday morning, the Bittensor price has climbed 15% in the past day to trade for $483.10. That's a 24% gain compared to this time last week, according to CoinGecko data.

That makes TAO the best performing asset in the top 100 on CoinGecko at the time of writing, beating ETH meme coin darling PepeCoin. PEPE and other meme OGs like Dogecoin and Shiba Inu, have all seen sizable gains as investors wait with bated breath to see if the Securities and Exchange Commission will approve a spot Ethereum ETF to trade.

A pseudonymous Crypto Twitter user, CEYEBER—who founded the official Bittensor Community Channel on Telegram—claims to have had the Grayscale rumor "confirmed by close sources." But if it's real, there's still no sign of it in Securities and Exchange Commission filings.

If the TAO offering were going to be another close-end fund available over-the-counter to wealthy investors—like the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust was before it was converted to a spot ETF and the rest of the firm's single asset funds still are—then there would likely be a Regulation D filing. More recently, in March, Grayscale filed to establish a Grayscale Bitcoin Mini Trust as a new spot BTC offering with an S-1 registration.

Neither type of filing has been submitted at the time of writing. In fact, "Bittensor" doesn't appear in any SEC filings at all going back to 2001. But that doesn't mean it's impossible. Grayscale did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Decrypt.

But the rumor isn't the only bullish news for the decentralized AI project.

The Taobot, a component of the Bittensor ecosystem, has been having a good week. On Tuesday, the team announced it had been accepted as one of the first projects to join Akash Network's LlaMa 3 API beta.

Akash network made a big splash last month when it announced that its chat supports supports Llama 3, the newest open source model from Meta AI.

"Test the newest model from Meta AI for yourself without creating an account," the project wrote on Twitter at the time. "Completely free and permissionless."

The Taobot team has also started working with the Bittensor Subnet 15 project, Blockchain Insights to allow users to to use simple language to analyze blockchain data.

The subnet has been working to organize blockchain data across multiple blockchain networks in the interest of making complex data queries more efficient.

"Our integration will empower users to perform diverse blockchain queries, from simple transactions to DeFi protocol analytics and NFT exchanges," the Taobot team wrote on Twitter yesterday. "The ultimate ambition is to create an LLM that can transform questions like these into precise queries and relay the subnet’s response, complete with a detailed explanation."