τp

Ikigai and Bittensor - a point of view I have been thinking about Ikigai lately and how surprisingly well it maps onto #Bittensor and $TAO I know the Ikigai concept from my professional career and it’s often visualized as the intersection of four things: 1. What you love 2. What you are good at 3. What the world needs 4. What you can be rewarded for Your “reason for being” sits somewhere in the middle and I think Bittensor subnets are going through a similar discovery process. In the early dTAO days, simply building something was often enough. Launch a subnet. Create an incentive mechanism (IM). Attract miners and validators. Get emissions. Simple. But as we mature, I think that is changing and the ones adapting, are the ones surviving. The subnets that ultimately matter, will find their own version of Ikigai. Recognising subnets that may have found their Ikigai, is a way to value subnets, incremental to just on-chain metrics and GitHubs. Let me talk you through an example that comes to mind: 1. What you love → Founder conviction The best teams probably will not be the ones chasing whatever narrative currently attracts emissions. The best teams are obsessed with the problem they want to be solving. Models. Inference, Math. Agents. Data. Compute. Whatever it is. That obsession matters because building something genuinely differentiated takes months and/or years, with true passion. 2. What you are good at → Competitive advantage Passion alone obviously is not enough. A subnet needs to produce something better, cheaper, faster or fundamentally different. Your competitive advantage has to survive competition, in and outside Bittensor. 3. What the world needs → Product-market fit This might be the biggest filter and qualification. Does anyone actually need what the subnet produces? Not validators, not alpha/tao holders, but actual users. A subnet can have a beautiful incentive design, beating any SOTA benchmarks, run sophisticated ML loops, and maintain a passionate community, but if nobody ultimately wants the output, what exactly are we incentivizing? 4. What you can be rewarded for → Sustainable economics And finally, economics. Bittensor adds something unusual to the Ikigai framework. The network itself can bootstrap the search. Emissions provide economic energy to miners, validators and builders before traditional product-market fit necessarily exists or is proven. But I don’t think emissions are the destination. They are the runway to profitability at scale. This is something that we truly should learn from corporates: profits at scale. Over time, the strongest subnets should increasingly be able to demonstrate why the intelligence they produce have economic value. And this is where I think the concept of Ikigai and Bittensor gets very interesting. Because these four circles don’t automatically overlap. You can have great technology nobody needs. Huge emissions without meaningful output. Strong demand but weak incentive design. Or passionate founders without a real competitive advantage. The market/staker responsibility is ultimately to figure out which subnets sit closest to the middle. And perhaps that is what Bittensor itself is becoming: A giant decentralized search for the Ikigai of machine intelligence. Thousands of people allocating capital, compute and intelligence toward different hypotheses about what AI should produce. Most will probably fail. Some will find temporary economic games. But a few may find that rare intersection where: they love building it, they are uniquely good at it, the world actually needs it, and the economics sustainably reward it. Those are the subnets I want to find. Finding the Ikigai in Bittensor.

Lmao

imho, now is the time to stake to: 1. Subnets with quality builders and insane work ethic 2. Subnets discounted by the recent sell-offs for no apparent reason 3. Subnet that have ADR below or around < 1.0 The ones with above mix are chef's kiss #Bittensor

These are real life products that will be the most tangible form of bringing Bittensor to the mass

Ditto is quietly becoming the front-end for the best of Bittensor subnets

There are some incredibly undervalued subnets out there, following the massive subnet sell-offs. Buy when there is blood on the street. Especially when they are related to machine learning with real concepts and ADR close to 1.0…. #Bittensor #subnets

Here is your “arc” pattern for subnets, which majority run through. What I am looking for from these teams: 1. Continue building 2. Continue marketing 3. Have a business model that makes sense (I.e., path to positive unit economics) 4. Commit to alpha buy backs @heydittoai

I believe the next shift in how we evaluate #Bittensor subnets will be unit economics, instead of revenue Revenue is great, but means little if heavily subsidized by emissions The real question is if subnets have a path to profitability and scalability

Gamma will be very bullish for #Bittensor: - bullish for subnets that provide commodities that other subnets can use (eg inference, compute) - bullish for subnets that build Bittensor native products, leveraging and using the best of subnets There are some incredibly undervalued subnets at the moment, following above two points Next weeks/months are going to be very exciting

One of the most promising teams and product propositions currently on #Bittensor

Good post - people still sleeping on Bittensor products such as @heydittoai that will bring outside capital from the “world” into the ecosystem. Those Bittensor products will leverage all Bittensor subnets and their intra subnet services to do that.