Bittensor Governance Crisis Erupts as Co-Founder Accused of Centralized Control

The Bittensor network has been hit with a major blow as Sam Dare, founder of Covenant AI, publicly accused co-founder Jacob Steeves of running a decentralized network that is not what it seems.

Dare's exit letter claimed that Steeves had unilaterally suspended emissions to Covenant AI's subnets, cutting off the team's income and orchestrating token sales as financial pressure during an internal dispute. The accusations also included a claim that Bittensor's governance model is effectively controlled by one person.

The fallout has been significant, with the price of TAO tokens falling over 20% in response to the news, and $10 million in long liquidations triggered. Covenant AI had previously made headlines with its achievement of training a 72-billion-parameter language model on Bittensor's network, but it seems that this may have been short-lived.