Native to decentralized artificial intelligence (AI) protocol Bitensor $TAO The token has risen about 90% over the past month, from around $180 in early March to more than $332 as of March 24, and that momentum has spilled over into the subnet token ecosystem.
According to CoinGecko data, the Bittensor Subnets category rose 30% in the past 24 hours, with a total market capitalization of $1.47 billion and trading volume of over $118 million. A significant number of subnet tokens tracked on the platform have experienced triple-digit growth rates over the past month.
Top subnets
What is a subnet?
Subnets are specialized mini-networks within the Bittensor ecosystem, each dedicated to a specific AI task, from language model training and distributed computing to sports prediction and cybersecurity. Miners within each subnet compete to produce high-quality AI output, and validators evaluate performance and make allocations. $TAO Reward them accordingly.
Since the release of Dynamic, $TAO (dTAO) February 2025, each subnet will act as its own automated market maker using natively allocated tokens. The evaluation of each subnet token is $TAO We bet on the reserves of that subnet and create direct economic connections with each other. $TAOprice and performance of subnet tokens. The Subnet ecosystem surpassed $500 million for the first time in April 2025, and by July 2025, the cumulative Subnet market cap approached $1 billion. $TAO Financial companies like xTAO and Synaptogenix emerged.
This relationship is recursive: $TAO for each subnet $TAO As the value of the reserve increases, the price of the subnet token increases, which in turn attracts more stakers and attention to the ecosystem.
Subnet highlights
of $TAO The rally accelerated on March 20th when NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang and investor Chamath Palihapitiya endorsed Bittensor’s decentralized AI training model on the All-In Podcast.
That enthusiasm spilled over into subnet tokens. τemplar (SN3), the subnet behind the Covenant-72B model that sparked the Nvidia-led bull market, is now the top subnet token with a market cap of $137 million after rising 444% in the last month.
Other notable 30-day performances include OMEGA Labs (SN24) at 440%, Level 114 (SN114) at 280%, BitQuant (SN15) at 230%, Nova (SN68) at 218%, and Grail (SN81) at 211%.
Even more established subnet tokens with larger market capitalizations have recorded higher monthly returns. Shoot (SN64), which has a market cap of $132 million, is up 54% in 30 days. Targon (SN4) increased by 166%, Rydges AI (SN62) by 85% and Hippius (SN75) by 115%.
The main catalyst for the broader gathering was the reveal of Covenant-72B. Covenant 72B is a large-scale language model trained without permission across Subnet 3 of Bittensor by more than 70 contributors using off-the-shelf Internet hardware. The model was trained with 1.1 trillion tokens and achieved a 67.1 MMLU score, which was confirmed in a March 2026 arXiv paper and was in the competitive range with Meta’s Llama 2 70B.
During his podcast appearance, Nvidia’s CEO championed both proprietary and open-source AI models as complementary, saying that the underlying AI technology benefits from decentralized innovation.
Decentralized AI Beta Play
You can get huge profits on subnet tokens compared to . $TAO As such, it reflects a dynamic that is familiar to the crypto market. In other words, small-cap ecosystem tokens tend to act as leveraged bets against their parent protocols. and $TAOhas a market capitalization of approximately $3 billion, with individual subnet tokens ranging from $1 million to $110 million, and these tokens offer significantly higher volatility in both directions.
Looking ahead, the Bittensor network plans to expand its active subnet capacity from 128 to 256 later this year, which could lead to a new wave of new subnet token launches and further expand the category.
before the first $TAO By the time of the halving in December 2025, the subnets have already reached a cumulative market capitalization of $1.28 billion, with Yuma, a subsidiary of Digital Currency Group, contributing to 14 different subnets. Possible regulatory decisions regarding grayscale conversion $TAO Trusts in spot ETFs could also provide access to additional institutional investors by late 2026.
For now, the proliferation of subnet tokens shows that market participants are confident that the decentralized AI story has staying power, and that Bittensor’s growing network of specialized AI subnets will be central to it.
