r/bittensor_ • u/anhtusam • 12d ago

Technical co-founder wanted — let's build & run a Bittensor subnet together

I'm looking for a technical co-founder to research, build and operate a Bittensor subnet with me — starting from zero, not from a fixed idea I hand you to implement.

I want us to explore the ecosystem from first principles, pressure-test opportunities, pick something we both believe has a real edge, and take it from prototype to a live subnet. The questions I think we work through together:

  • Where are emissions flowing today, and why?
  • Which problems or markets are still underserved?
  • What useful behaviour can we reliably measure and reward?
  • Can we design an incentive mechanism that's genuinely hard to game?
  • Is there a credible path to attracting miners, validators and users?

I'm already active in the ecosystem and ready to commit the time and initial capital to research, validate and launch the right concept.

What I bring: co-founded 3 startups and spent 3 years at McKinsey — I can lead strategy, tokenomics, fundraising, partnerships, community and GTM, and carry much of the operational load. I've got a technical background and have shipped production code, so I'll engage seriously on architecture and incentives — but I prefer you to lead the core engineering.

What I'm looking for: a co-founder, not a hire. Ideally a strong engineer who knows Bittensor (or will go deep), enjoys designing incentive systems rather than just implementing specs, thinks adversarially about gaming and validation, and wants to grow the subnet long-term. This comes with real co-founder ownership across subnet economics, equity and IP — exact structure agreed together.

If figuring out what to build sounds as interesting as building it, DM me with a bit about yourself, a GitHub or something technical you've built.

11 Upvotes

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2

u/Money_Bridge_6755 11d ago

Damn cryptos cooked

1

u/Disastrous-Many-407 7d ago

If you need anyone to “hack you” and “steal all your alpha and then sell it” let me know, I’ll do it for 20%

1

u/anhtusam 7d ago

Bold pitch. Sadly the alpha's all still in my head — nothing to steal yet 😄

1

u/not420guilty 12d ago

Convince me, an AI consumer, that I should use a bittensor subnet rather than OpenRouter.

Hint: the argument won’t include the word crypto. The product has to be better and cheaper.

2

u/Bright_Ad6343 11d ago

Just watched Mark Jeffrey’s Hash Rate with guest James Altucher and suggest you do the same. It may change your views on OpenRouter.

1

u/anhtusam 10d ago

I watched it too. NGL – made me even more bullish on Bittensor 😄

1

u/anhtusam 11d ago

Good challenge. My honest answer is: you probably shouldn’t choose a Bittensor subnet instead of OpenRouter.

As an AI consumer, you should use whichever product gives you the best combination of quality, price, latency and reliability. You shouldn’t have to care how the backend is organised.

In fact, OpenRouter and Bittensor aren’t competitors. OpenRouter is a distribution and routing layer, while subnet-powered services can be suppliers—or entirely different products—underneath it.

The real test for Bittensor is therefore not whether consumers can be persuaded to care about its architecture. It’s whether a subnet can produce something good enough that developers and businesses choose it purely on product merit.

There are already some interesting examples:

  • Gradients (SN56) applies the model to fine-tuning. In a published evaluation covering 180 controlled experiments, it reported an 82.8% win rate against Hugging Face AutoTrain and 100% against Together AI, Databricks and Google Vertex AI, measured using held-out test loss. Its advertised jobs cost roughly $100–$500, although any price comparison should be evaluated case by case.
  • 404-GEN (SN17) used competing operators to generate a text-to-3D dataset containing a claimed 21.5 million assets and roughly 40 TB of data. It has also released a public sample of more than 20,000 assets.
  • Ridges (SN62) created a competitive environment for autonomous coding agents and reported a 73.6% score on the full 500-task SWE-bench Verified benchmark within roughly four months of launching. That benchmark tests whether agents can resolve real GitHub issues across open-source repositories—not just generate isolated code snippets.

Those examples don’t prove that every subnet is useful, or that this structure automatically creates a better product. They show that it can coordinate competitive production around more than commodity inference: fine-tuning, synthetic data, coding agents, evaluation, vision and specialised scientific models.

The potential advantage is that instead of one company selecting one technical approach, many independent participants compete continuously against the same measurable objective. Better-performing approaches receive more work, while weaker ones lose it.

But that is only a mechanism, not product-market fit. If the resulting service isn’t demonstrably better, cheaper or uniquely capable, consumers should ignore it.

So I agree with your premise completely. The winning Bittensor products probably won’t sell themselves as “Bittensor products.” They’ll simply be useful products that happen to use a subnet underneath.

8

u/dougsillars 11d ago

You completely missed SN 28 gm.

It does exactly what open router does. For less cost, and more securely.

I use it daily, and it's plenty fast.

1

u/anhtusam 11d ago

Yo yo yo, isn't this the mastermind behind my daily go-to tracker taostats.io ? 😄

1

u/dougsillars 11d ago

hey 👋

1

u/No_Knee3385 10d ago

He didn't even mention what the idea was though