Investor. Prev. Brevan Howard and Goldman Sachs. All personal opinion, not financial advice :)
- Tweets 2,097
- Following 4,998
- Followers 5,862
- Likes 25,650
Recently joined @DeFianceCapital after a short but fruitful time working in Goldman. When pitching crypto/DeFi to TradFi friends, I often got asked: so what is the social value of DeFi? Here's my thesis:
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Building @TensorplexLabs with @xponentcrisis and a great team of engineers.
Using blockchain and tokens to decentralize + accelerate open-source AI is the most important non-financial use case crypto can bring.
So painfully obvious and we're all just getting started.
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Bittensor is now a market-driven, optimistic decentralized AI VC now that dTAO is live.
Here’s how it works:
• Anyone can launch a subnet (a decentralized AI project) and get initial funding through TAO emissions into the subnet’s fair-launched dTAO liquidity pool.
• Over time, dTAO supply grows, so sustaining a high price demands more capital. If the market approves of the subnet, its dTAO price holds strong, keeping funding alive.
• If the market sees the project as unsuccessful, dTAO’s price falls, and TAO funding slows.
• When a subnet succeeds, delivering real value and drives value to dTAO holders, this pulls more TAO into the liquidity pool as investors pile in, driving up TAO’s value.
Subnet wins fuel $TAO and ecosystem growth.
Pretty cool right?
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Sharing about Bittensor with Chinese institutional investors today.
Many OGs here come from Bitcoin mining, so they just get the power of decentralized incentives to drive effective coordination, and how that same force can be applied to AI.
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Have been mega bullish $CVX since ~3x ago, still think it can 12x from here to ~$700 in the bull case. A thread on my thesis — not financial advice!
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Very grateful for all the friends that reached out last few days, it has truly been the worst week of my life.
The kindness will be remembered and hopefully reciprocated! :)
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Dynamic $TAO's tokenomics impact is straightforward:
Demand side:
Higher TAO demand as degens need TAO to ape into subnet tokens
Supply side:
Lower TAO supply as TAO emissions now flow to subnet token LPs vs direct distribution to participants (miners/validators/subnet owners)
Participants need to think twice before selling:
Lower subnet token prices = reduced future TAO emissions to their LP = playing themselves long term
Fun times ahead!
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Anecdotally from DCG Summit Week:
@BarrySilbert on stage: Bittensor resembles Bitcoin circa 2013
A 2014 ETH ICO investor: Bittensor ecosystem resembles Ethereum in 2017
An early Solana VC (more than 100x his fund): Bittensor ecosystem resembles Solana in 2020
Not sure if TAO is the next BTC or ETH or SOL but I don't mind either
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Limitless subnets
No registration fees
Untethered subnet tokens
Depermissioned EVM
These are what builders have been asking for, and @const_reborn delivers
TLDR: Bittensor ecosystem acceleration, all leading to improved $TAO economics
Limitless subnets
No registration fees
Untethered subnet tokens
Depermissioned EVM
Let the neural internet roar
Q1 2025
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Imagine spending 4 years in MIT and having your own exchange + market maker, end up being outtraded by @CL207 on his mobile phone.
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Back at it and crushing it!
@TensorplexLabs is back on top on the Hugging Face Leaderboard for Bittensor Subnet 6.
Fine-tuning the best model, advancing open source AI and pushing $TAO.
(τ, τ)
huggingface.co/spaces/NousRe…
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Back home after a 16 hour flight! No regrets though—Ojai, California is beautiful and incredibly proud to be invited by @DCGco for what turned out to be as much a Bittensor summit as the 8th DCG Summit 😉.
Betting this photo becomes a landmark moment in decentralized AI & crypto in 5 years (that's me in the white @TensorplexLabs shirt on the right!)
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The success of Virtuals/ai16z in consumer AI agents and Bittensor subnets' work on decentralized AI infrastructure are complementary.
As agents scale in TVL and influence, robust training/inference infrastructure becomes even more vital.
More consumer facing apps and subnets coming soon from the Bittensor eco—stay tuned!
Shoutout @virtuals_io—my former team @DeFianceCapital backed them pre-rebrand and their pivot to the agent economy has been nothing short of incredible.
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Jumped on the bandwagon as @DominicCarb couldn't stop raving about @oopa_nft on the timeline 😆
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Bittensor is Bitcoin for AI.
Discover and trade Bittensor subnets at backprop.finance.
Check out my latest conversation with @BarrySilbert— from the early days of #Bitcoin to founding @DCGco and his next big crypto venture: Bittensor.
00:00 - Raoul introduces the thesis
05:00 - Barry’s $BTC origin story
10:00 - Birth of Grayscale and DCG
15:00 - Building crypto infrastructure
20:00 - The 2022 crypto crash
25:00 - Fallout from Three Arrows and FTX
30:00 - Surviving crisis and personal hardship
35:00 - Entering the AI + crypto era
40:00 - What is the Bittensor Network?
45:00 - Tor token and subnet mechanics
50:00 - The future of decentralized intelligence
55:00 - Final thoughts and what’s next
As ever, I hope you find it useful. Enjoy!
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Quality coverage on @bittensor_ by @MessariCrypto.
Noticing more investors are flipping their script & building a $TAO thesis after its price doubled in a month 👀
messari.io/report/the-dynami…
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It’s been a great panel, here’s a quick recap of my points:
Subnet dTAO = early-early-stage venture investing.
Unlike altcoins, you’re dealing with unique inflation + yield dynamics. Don’t ape blindly.
What to invest in:
• Cost-efficient subnets undercutting centralized infra
• Subnets with pricing power
• Moonshots tackling hard problems (e.g. decentralized training)
Portfolio strategy:
• Keep significant proportion of liquid TAO as core bag for future optionality
• Stack yield via blue-chip subnets
• Add emerging subnets depending on your risk tolerance
And of course: use backprop.finance to trade dTAO alpha tokens
Panel - How to Invest in Subnet Tokens
Meet The Panelists:
⭐David Lawee (@dlawee) — Co-Founder, @CrucibleLabs
⭐Joseph Jacks (@JosephJacks_) — Founder & General Partner, @Latentholdings
⭐Amit Mehra (@amitm_eth) — Partner, @Borderless_cap
⭐CK Cheung (@ckcheung) — Co-Founder, @TensorplexLabs
⭐Sami Kassab (@Old_Samster) — Managing Partner. @UnsupervisedCap
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With Dynamic TAO's launch, Bittensor isn't just a decentralized AI network - it's also a launchpad for AI networks.
You need TAO to buy these AI network tokens, and future TAO emissions will flow into their buy side liquidity pools instead of directly hitting the market.
Also, these tokens are fair launched - teams need to earn their tokens gradually.
This creates strong incentives for teams to keep building and improving, rather than engineering ways to dump tokens OTC.
Bittensor has been a powerful incentive mechanism and Dynamic TAO supercharges it.
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Crypto Twitter pre-2021 was a goldmine of genuine alpha and anon traders freely sharing knowledge. I learned what I know about investing and risk management from that era.
Having Darryl share detailed analysis and trades as Pigeon was a gift to the new generation of CT. I watched him grind from DeFiance days - choosing to build everything from scratch despite a rather privileged background. He could've taken an easier path, but chose to earn his success trade by trade.
Sad to see one of CT's most transparent traders forced to leave because he... checks notes ...wrote a detailed ENA thesis that went 3x, while holding locked tokens he literally cannot sell?
The space loses another genuine voice.
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Design a decentralized AI lab from first principles and you'll discover $TAO is inevitable.
Subnet builders determine the objective function.
Miners research and compete.
Validators verify and monetize.
Simple. Elegant. Inevitable.
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It has been a pleasure meeting friends in Hong Kong. In case I didn't get to tell you in person yet:
Yes, there is $100 million delegated to our validator, and $15 million using our stTAO LST.
But @TensorplexLabs is more than just an LST project or validator business — we are going to target one of the biggest AI development challenges.
Announcement soon!
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If you're in Singapore this week for SuperAI, join us on Wednesday for a special Bittensor mixer!
Catch the latest on decentralized AI from Bittensor subnets by @TensorplexLabs, @404gen_, @inference_labs, @tplr_ai, and more.
Co-hosted by @DCGco, @YumaGroup, and @TensorplexLabs.
RSVP: lu.ma/t7shl9yn
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Alt season on Bittensor and this page is all you need
To make it easier for users to see information about each Bittensor subnet directly from the screener page, we have also added the links (github, website and twitter) to each of the subnet dTAO token. Check it out on backprop.finance/screener
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Observation at Proof of Talk Conference:
Venue alternates between Bittensor and crypto panels.
Packed house during every Bittensor talk, and crowd immediately empties when crypto panels begin.
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For friends who don’t know who @AdrianCheng is:
He’s one of the best businessman and entrepreneur you can find in HK/Greater China, especially when it comes to Art + Web3 + Operations.
Guess I’ll be seeing a lot more Azukis in K11 malls 🤣
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Just finished listening to @WeeklyOpen by @ledgerstatus @donalt @CryptoCred, very underrated podcast.
Agree with Ledger that if we bottomed, it will be so obvious in hindsight:
- Peak economic fears
- Peak tightening pace
- Peak liquidation
piped.video/watch?v=1854tAXo…
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You know ETH merge is the biggest crypto narrative in years?
You know many investors/funds will be offside if macro gets slightly better?
Imagine the FOMO if we break $2k.
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(1/2) My updated $ALPHA thesis for the next 1-2 months:
- @tascha_panpan and @nipun_pit remain one of the most qualified founders in Crypto
- The exploit will be settled well (given suspect probably known + good relationship with @CreamdotFinance and @AndreCronjeTech )
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145% APR and close to $500k TVL less than one day after we deployed our incentives 🤯
@TensorplexLabs 🤝 @Aerodromefi
Bittensor🤝Base ✈️
$stTAO - $ETH initial liquidity and voting incentives are now live on @aerodromefi, the #1 Layer 2 DEX by TVL.
Get ready for jaw-dropping yields in the $stTAO - $ETH pool after the voting epoch flip on Wednesday!
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Bittensor booth is right in the middle of @superai_conf in Singapore! 🇸🇬
Come meet teams including @TensorplexLabs, @TeamRizzoAI, @404gen_, @tplr_ai, and @GraphiteSubnet.
Plus, don’t miss our side event tonight:
lu.ma/t7shl9yn
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there’re no tariffs on bittensor subnets
🚀 Ask and ye shall receive!
Bubble charts are now available in the Screener at backprop.finance
📝 Tag us to let us know what you want us to build next!
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We’re building Tensorplex Dojo to be decentralized Scale AI
Scoop from @coryweinberg: Meta to pay more than $14 billion for stake in Scale AI and grab the startup’s founder in an unusual deal aimed at bolstering its AI effort.
Read more 👇
theinformation.com/articles/…
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dTAO is heating up, over $10M traded on @BackpropFinance in just the last 24 hours!
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One man was born ready for this @wagmiAlexander
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71.38% fixed APY for stTAO PT holders on Pendle 🤯🤯
Pretty sure this is the highest single-sided TAO yield available.
Stake wTAO to get stTAO at stake.tensorplex.ai
Buy PT stTAO at app.pendle.finance/trade/mar…
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$UST will end up similar to $FRAX, but @stablekwon started from 0 collateral while @samkazemian started from 100% collateralised
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While organizing @TensorplexLabs' Bittensor Subnet database, I'm impressed by the ecosystem's progress.
Unlike most Web3 ecosystems where dev productivity correlates with token prices, Bittensor's unique incentives (constant rewards + subnet deregistration risk) keep devs motivated.
Builder quality has been up only.
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Influencers trying to shill you the next $TAO.
Why settle for a knockoff when Bittensor is ever evolving?
There is no second best.
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My pleasure sharing what we are building @TensorplexLabs and @BackpropFinance on the podcast of the legendary @markjeffrey!
Hash Rate - Ep 124: Backprop / Tensorplex / Dojo (sn52)
🧙 Guest: CK @ckcheung of @TensorplexLabs @BackpropFinance $TAO
00:00 Introduction and Overview of Backprop
04:27 The Vision Behind Tensorplex and Backprop
10:14 Dojo (subnet 52): Bridging Human Taste and AI
17:32 Show and Tell: Visualizing Dojo's Functionality
27:05 Telegram Bot and Future Developments
27:17 Simplifying Crypto Trading with Telegram
30:21 Decentralized AI: A Bottom-Up Approach
39:06 Understanding Dojo's Role in Bittensor
44:12 Funding and Growth in the Bittensor Ecosystem
48:24 The Controversy of Burning Miner Emissions
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ETH is becoming pristine yield-bearing collateral for the entire crypto economy.
Excited to see how DeFi innovates on top of staked ETH in 2023. Ideas like being pre-paid your ETH staking yield pioneered by @AlchemixFi are just the beginning.
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Been so excited for @derekedws and @Ronangmi's article to drop, and it's finally here!
Bittensor is elegantly designed to incentivize productive work by combining Bitcoin's tokenomics with a highly flexible incentive mechanism, which will be supercharged with the upcoming launch of dynamic $TAO.
Still time to dive into Bittensor before rest of the world catches on.
medium.com/collab-currency/r…
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We taught Qwen2.5 interface coding from scratch using data collected by Dojo (Subnet 52 on Bittensor).
Proof that decentralized human feedback data collection works phenomenally.
What's next for Dojo:
- Human-feedback loop for richer data collection
- Ship dynamic human-agent interfaces
- Partner across industries
🚀 Tensorplex Dojo (Subnet 52) in action!
Meet DOJO-INTERFACE-CODER-7B:
Qwen2.5-Coder-7B-Instruct, fine-tuned with Dojo datasets to craft stunning front-end UIs!
✨ Generates beautiful, interactive interfaces
✨ Trained on synthetic data with distributed human feedback
✨ Powered by dojo.network (Subnet 52) on Bittensor
👇
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Great thread, we at @TensorplexLabs are building Dojo (Subnet 52) to be ‘The Gym’ in the decentralized RL pipeline.
1/ "There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen." At present, nowhere does this quote feel more apt than in the field of AI. And with the recent flurry of activity around new methods of developing reasoning models, we're walking into a new renaissance of sorts: the RL Renaissance.
This thread dives into the newly forming RL paradigm for model improvement, and explores how decentralization might be leveraged to further it 🧵
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Not sure if I should be proud but @KyleLDavies reads my messages quicker than my gf
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I have a sneaky suspicion that a project starting with "Bit" and ending with "Tensor" might get a mention... and that @fundstrat would be very interested.
I am looking forward to speaking with @BarrySilbert next week!!!
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We originally designed Dojo Network to collect quality Web3 data & improve Bittensor's output (via crowd-sourced feedback for subnet scoring).
@xponentcrisis and our engineers ended up designing a credible crowd intelligence machine for AI.
I'm hyped af!
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Btw bullish founders still grinding after multiple bear markets and having his Optimism optimism validated @kain
Just published my L2H2 @synthetix update, make sure you settle into a comfy chair before reading it... mirror.xyz/kain.eth/wstTdM5t…
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Changing tyres of a moving race car — the achievement is under-appreciated literally because of how successful it went.
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(2/2)
- Tokenomics to be announced, staking coming
- AlphaX (DeFi perpetual swap) launching soon
- Something related to synthetic assets coming (probably DeFi synthetic assets perpetual swap, huge market)
- Cross-chain DeFi coming
Market cap can 10X from here, can’t wait!
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AI is an incredibly centralizing technology. Crypto, our best decentralization tech, is the perfect counterbalance.
The biggest issue with decentralized AI? It's nearly impossible for ordinary people to contribute (beyond posting about $TAO).
Human Participation is key to unlocking DeAI's full potential.
Working on it.
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Happy BTC ATH! Quick flashback to 2021:
On my last day at Goldman Sachs before joining DeFiance Capital, I gave a crypto presentation on a team call (~20 people in APAC).
When the topic was introduced, a few people immediately dropped off the call (corporate systems make that sound pretty obvious!).
After covering BTC, ETH, smart contracts, stablecoins, etc., someone asked: "Do you think Bitcoin can hit $1M one day?"
I replied: "Definitely, it's just a matter of time."
I remember hearing laughter in the background.
Wonder how they're feeling today!
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Calling TAO useless by (inaccurately) analyzing 1 of the 32 subnets lol
Same as dismissing Ethereum and DeFi after testing out EtherDelta.
@Old_Samster has written the best response.
The uselessness of $TAO is truly spectacular
$10 billion marketcap for an "AI coin"
Go check it out—what does it actually do?
It runs a bunch of different subnets. Okay? What are these subnets? Check out subnet #1.
Okay, so text prompting. Cool. That's easy enough to understand.
But what's actually going on there?
Check the docs. github.com/opentensor/prompt…
Okay, so miners on this subnet run 2 different LLMs. Zephyr and wiki-agent.
Mostly they all just run Zephyr, the base model (now switching to one called Solar).
The idea is super simple.
You send in a prompt. The miners will run the LLM and respond to you, like ChatGPT.
Miners who do this are rewarded with TAO tokens. This is how TAO tokens are brought into existence.
But it does mean that for every prompt, you have literally a thousand miners who will complete the exact same task, redundantly.
The network will then validate these answers by checking how similiar they are to eachother. If you're an outlier you don't get TAO tokens.
So what's going on here is that a prompt will be generated, such as "What is water?"
And the miners will respond with "Water is a chemical compound with the molecular formula H2O", and they're all incentivized run the same LLM because outlier responses are punished.
This is repeated in parallel a thousand of times by a thousand different miners.
There's no AI magic to validate whether a model was actually run. There's nothing that stops miners from copying replies from eachother and tweaking them, spoofing their work.
The validation mechanism is super basic:
In the present version, the validator produces one or more reference answers which all miner responses are compared to. Those which are most similar to the reference answer will attain the highest rewards and ultimately gain the most incentive. —github.com/opentensor/prompt…
Setting aside how easy this is to spoof for a second, just think about the incomprehensible inefficiency of this system. For each prompt, you have 1000 miners doing the same work? So that you'll reach a level of "decentralized intelligence"?
Look my dudes. Just put a single miner in Tanzania. Prompt it. If it gets shut down or outputs bad data, fall-over to a different one somewhere else. You don't need 1000 different redudant LLMs to run these basic bitch language models in parallel if you can't even protect against them copying and tweaking answers to fake their homework.
And what even is the purpose of running these "decentralized" models? Zephyr, Solar and wiki-agent have the same kind of content filters that ChatGPT has. Zephyr is even trained on ChatGPT dialogue output. So you have 1000 miners serving you the same bottom-of-the-barrel answers 1000 less efficiently than its centralized counterparts, *still* with no ability to verify whether 1000 separate answers were even generated since the only thing you're doing is checking for similarity.
Now, the crown jewel of this ridiculous piece of garbage is the fact that you can't even prompt this network as a regular user.
Go on, try it. Go try to actually interface with this network as a user and get a Zephyr-generated response from 1000 miners.
You can't.
The only thing that is happening in this subnet is internal, validators generate challenge prompts and 1000 miners generate the same basic bitch LLM response and collect TAO tokens.
These TAO tokens are then sold into a $10 billion FDV market cap of retail idiot buyers who are trying to get exposure to "decentralized AI" by buying this piece of shit AI memecoin.
Bittensor is pretty much what a highschooler would think of if he was tasked with creating an AI coin. "Uhh I just have maybe 1000 miners generating answers to prompts, so it's like, uh, decentralized?"
"Okay, and how do you check that? How do you do the verification?"
"Uh, maybe the network can check, like, if the answers are similar or some shit?"
This is a pointless exercise in decentralization that only serves the purpose of vaguely resembling doing something with "decentralized AI", which of course is a cool meme right now, but it doesn't actually provide you with any assurances, any utility, except a 1000x less efficient ChatGPT-bot that can only answer questions to itself so it has an excuse to print tokens to dump on the crypto retail market.
Send it to fucking 0.
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When should we tweet about it 👀🤔
Bittensor is incentivizing miners like @TensorplexLabs to train better foundational models through SN9, the pretraining subnet.
As a result, a 7b model is outperforming Llama 7b, Llama2 7b, and Falcon 7b on the benchmarks below.
It works, and it's just getting started.
$TAO
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Pendle integration ✅
We are excited to announce the integration of stTAO with @pendle_fi, providing a range of yield-earning strategies for the Bittensor community to earn with their TAO!
(τ, τ)
app.pendle.finance/trade/mar…
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I ended up missing a class because I know I would learn much more from this than the class, and I couldn't wait to finish the episode!
Thanks @zhusu and @hasufl as usual and love @CryptoCobain's humour!
In this episode, @zhusu and I sat down with legendary trader @CryptoCobain to discuss
- the bull case for Ethereum and its upcoming catalysts
- whether ETH can flippen BTC
- what advice has helped Cobie to survive several market cycles
Enjoy!
piped.video/watch?v=ho39imoA…
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New Escape Velocity episode with @ai and my co-host @0xPrismatic 🎙️
Anand is one of the sharpest thinkers I know in AI, crypto, and venture. Every time we talk I come away with new insights. Glad more people can hear his perspective here!
We cover:
• Is AI the biggest bubble of our lifetime?
• Lessons from Microsoft → startups → VC
• Where AI x Crypto may actually find product-market fit
Listen here:
Apple: podcasts.apple.com/sg/podcas…
Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/6Si…
YouTube: piped.video/OvkdPolotRg?si=Sy_h…
Follow @the_EVpodcast and subscribe for more.
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Cross dTAO subnet swaps now supported, let us know what other features to add at @BackpropFinance!
Cross Subnet Swaps are now available on Backprop Finance! Now you can directly swap your Alpha token from one Alpha to another Alpha!
@TensorplexLabs @BackpropFinance
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If you hold both TAO and ETH, consider the new stTAO/ETH Uniswap v2 pool:
We offer $300,000 in annualized incentives to boost TAO on-chain liquidity, you still earn yield on your TAO and Uniswap v2 limits the IL.
300%+ APR now!
Let's grow TAO on-chain liquidity with our stTAO farming campaign on Uniswap V2 and V3!
Earn over $300,000 in annual incentives by providing liquidity to the stTAO/ETH pool.
Claim rewards at stake.tensorplex.ai/farm
More chains, partnerships and incentives coming soon!
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yo @CL207 why don’t you start your own effective altruist exchange too
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Ngl @gemxyz is the best Web3 native product I’ve ever used
🧹⚡️ Sweep Mode is now live!
Automatically sweep NFT collections by selecting the amount of items or ETH budget for your sweep.
Want to go even faster? 🏎 Instantly check out with ETH with the “Buy Now” button and skip the whole payment flow.
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Up 3.5x so far, still just 3.5 ETH floor price.
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Huge fan of the team and the art of their masks!
We are thrilled to announce that MixMob has raised ✨$7M✨ in our latest seed funding round!
This influx of capital will fuel our game development in the months and years ahead
Something BIG is coming later today💥
Join us: discord.gg/mixmob
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Can't wait! Many retail holders who simply find gas fees > leveraged gains on Ethereum can now leverage yield farm, expecting @AlphaFinanceLab users to grow more than many expected.
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Also, once we return to a strong trending market, you’ll run out of people to counter-trade.
Lately, the concept of viewing specific individuals as counter-trading signals has risen in popularity.
‘X is buying? Time to dump our bags.’
‘Feel pretty good that Y is long as we’re bearish’
These notations are not only foolish, but reflect mental immaturity.
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Thanks @markjeffrey for the support 👑🫶
The @BackpropFinance terminal is being featured on @Jason's live stream as Bittensor is being introduced
Thanks @markjeffrey!
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You have access to the best financial services in the DeFi world regardless of where you are born/living. This is the globalisation of finance. Same for builders - you win by building better products, not by being close to the person regulating your country's financial system.
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