Bittensor Co-founder: Will gradually achieve full protocol decentralization within the next 18 months

BlockBeats News, June 22 — Bittensor co-founder Const published a long article, systematically outlining the project’s current state of centralized governance and its future decentralization roadmap. He said that Bittensor has not yet reached a fully decentralized state similar to Bitcoin, but this is not a design flaw; rather, it is a strategic choice the project made during the rapid evolution stage of artificial intelligence. Unlike Bitcoin, which at its inception immediately faced challenges from national-level financial systems, AI is still in an early stage of development. Therefore, Bittensor chooses to prioritize ensuring the speed of innovation and the efficiency of protocol iteration, with the core team leading key upgrades, in order to continuously optimize network mechanisms and economic models, rather than entering too early a slow on-chain governance phase.

Const emphasized that Bittensor has already achieved decentralization at the most critical levels, including token distribution, network ownership, and ecosystem participation rights. Since the project went live, it has never conducted pre-mining. It has been running for more than five years, and it distributes TAO to contributors worldwide through an open competition mechanism. The current ecosystem has 128 subnet teams, more than 20 core validator teams, and a large number of independent developers and community members. Anyone can build subnets, participate in mining, or use AI services on the network without permission. In his view, Bittensor has achieved “ownership decentralization,” and the parts that are not fully decentralized mainly focus on the protocol’s core development directions and upgrade decision-making layers, which is not essentially different from the stage in which Bitcoin was initially developed and led by Satoshi Nakamoto.

Looking ahead, Bittensor plans to further improve network efficiency and capital allocation by enhancing validator competition mechanisms, enabling two-way trading and shorting functions for open liquidity pools, introducing Alpha token holder governance rights (the Conviction mechanism), continuously optimizing the TaoFlow and DTAO emission and distribution models, and removing teams that only extract value long-term without contributing to ecosystem development, thereby further enhancing network efficiency and its ability to allocate capital. The founder expects that in the next approximately 18 months, when incentive mechanisms, value discovery mechanisms, and ownership systems complete coordinated operation, Bittensor will gradually complete final protocol hardening and full decentralization. At that time, the core team will give up control, allowing the network to run independently in a programmatic, tamper-proof manner, ultimately realizing its vision of a “millennium intelligent federation.”