Bittensor TAO Surges 100% to $317 on AI Advances

Bittensor's TAO token surged nearly 100 percent in March 2026, reaching approximately $317 and pushing the network's market capitalization above $3 billion, fueled by a major technical breakthrough in decentralized AI training and advancing institutional interest.

The rally capped a month of heightened activity for Bittensor, a blockchain-based platform that incentivizes collaborative machine learning through its subnet ecosystem. On March 25, Subnet 3, known as Templar, released Covenant72B, a large language model with 72 billion parameters trained across more than 70 distributed nodes using standard hardware. The model achieved a score of 67.1 on the MMLU benchmark, a key evaluation for AI performance, placing it on par with Meta's Llama 2 70B. This milestone demonstrated the feasibility of permissionless, decentralized training for complex AI systems, countering prior doubts about its efficiency compared to centralized data centers.

The development drew external validation when Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, during an appearance on the All-In podcast, described decentralized AI training as a viable approach, spotlighting Bittensor's model just days before the token's 17 percent...