Bittensor's TAO token has climbed from roughly $180 to above $332 this month — a gain of approximately 90% — while the network's subnet tokens have moved even faster, reaching a combined market cap of $1.47 billion with $118 million in 24-hour trading volume, according to CoinGecko data.

Outsized Subnet Moves

Individual subnet tokens are acting as leveraged bets on TAO's price. Templar (Subnet 3) gained 444% in 30 days. OMEGA Labs rose 440%. Level 114 added 280%. BitQuant gained 230%. Even larger tokens like Targon were up 166%.

The mechanics explain why the moves are so outsized: when TAO appreciates, every subnet's TAO-denominated reserve becomes more valuable, inflating token prices and attracting more stakers in a reflexive cycle.

The Catalysts

Two events drove the rally. First, Subnet 3 (Templar) produced Covenant-72B — a 72B parameter language model trained permissionlessly across Bittensor's decentralized network by over 70 contributors using commodity hardware. The model achieved a 67.1 MMLU score, putting it in competitive range with Meta's Llama 2 70B, and the announcement accumulated 1.7 million views on X.

Second, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and investor Chamath Palihapitiya endorsed Bittensor's approach on the All-In Podcast on March 20, framing decentralized AI training as complementary to proprietary models. Coming from the CEO whose single blog post briefly reversed a tech stock selloff earlier this month, the co-sign carried weight beyond the usual crypto echo chamber.

What Comes Next

Bittensor plans to expand from 128 to 256 active subnets later this year. A potential Grayscale TAO Trust-to-spot-ETF conversion could open institutional access by late 2026. Digital Currency Group subsidiary Yuma is already contributing to 14 different subnets, signaling infrastructure-level interest.

Whether the subnet rally holds depends on whether Covenant-72B was a one-off or the beginning of a pattern of competitive decentralized AI outputs.