This is quite interesting. Do you remember the story of Huang Renxing liking Bittensor? In March, Old Huang said on the All-In podcast that decentralized AI systems are “quite an outstanding technological achievement,” and as a result TAO surged straight to $370, with the entire crypto community treating Bittensor as a beacon of hope.

But only half a month later, everything fell apart. Now TAO is down to around $246, plunging sharply for several consecutive days, and the entire ecosystem has fallen into a storm of public opinion.

The key issue is that what Huang Renxing actually liked wasn’t Bittensor itself, but a subnet team called Covenant AI. This team trained the Covenant-72B model—72 billion parameters—and completed it with more than 70 independent contributors using ordinary hardware. The scale really is at a historical level. But the power game inside it is the real story.

On April 10, Covenant AI founder Sam Dare suddenly issued a statement announcing that he was exiting the Bittensor network. The reason was very straightforward: although Bittensor founder Const claims decentralization, in reality, one person controls absolute power. Sam Dare accused Const of pausing their subnet emissions, revoking community management rights, unilaterally scrapping infrastructure, and even applying pressure through large-scale TAO selling.

This is quite awkward. Bittensor claims to have distributed governance with “three people holding the reins,” but Const has never truly relinquished power; authority has always remained in the hands of a single person. For a project that focuses on decentralized AI, these accusations directly hit the most core narrative.

From a market perspective, Covenant AI’s departure means that the most technically capable team in the Bittensor ecosystem has been pulled out. This not only affects progress on the product side, but more importantly shakes participants’ confidence. The technological achievement that Huang praised at the time has now, ironically, become the fuse that exposes internal contradictions within Bittensor.

Const later only responded vaguely that it would promote the emergence of subnets that run “truly headless,” but TAO token holders in the community are clearly not satisfied and are urging him to provide a more detailed explanation. This power struggle is unlikely to be calmed down in the short term.