CryptoLex 🦍

A Bittensor subnet just outscored Claude and Cursor on the SWE benchmark. They spent less than $1 million to get there. Anthropic spent billions. I sat down with @markjeffrey, one of the most connected people in the Bittensor ecosystem, and he broke down everything. Here's what most people don't know about TAO. Bittensor takes Bitcoin's mining concept and makes it programmable. Instead of solving meaningless hash puzzles, miners compete on real AI tasks. Best freelancer wins. Blockchain pays them. No company. No CEO. No permission needed. Bitcoin did this for energy. Bittensor does it for talent. The numbers are wild: • Ridges (Subnet 62) built a Claude/Cursor competitor for under $1M • Miners on Ridges were earning $50K per day at peak • The Bittensor network has 128 subnets, each like its own AI startup • Mark says 20-30 of them could become multi-billion dollar companies • Only 20% of TAO is staked in subnets right now • Stakers are earning up to 80% yield on some subnets Mark has been in crypto since 2013. He was in the Ethereum ICO. He's seen every cycle. His take: Bittensor is the most important thing to happen in crypto since Ethereum. He calls TAO the "third great coin" alongside Bitcoin and ETH. The comparison to early Bitcoin is hard to ignore. TAO just had its first halving in December. Same 21 million supply cap. Same post-halving setup. When Bitcoin went through this phase, it jumped from $250 to $10,000. Mark's conservative target for TAO by end of 2026: $3,000. But the real insight was about demand. More subnets means more TAO gets locked up. Subnet cap going from 128 to 256. Staking will absorb most of the supply. And AI agents need crypto to transact. They can't open bank accounts. Bittensor is building the rails for that. Jensen Huang just talked about Templar, a Bittensor subnet, on stage. This isn't theoretical anymore. People are using this stuff. The products on Bittensor are 10 to 100x better than what we saw in early Ethereum. And we're still early.