Bitcast (SN93): The Decentralized Ad Network That Pays Creators to Mine

Today's $32 billion influencer marketing industry runs on opacity.

It's no secret that engagement and follower counts are easily gamed, but without a proper system in place to combat the illusion, brands are at the mercy of the social platforms' data, meaning they pay for largely unverifiable metrics.

Bitcast (SN93) is on a mission to tear out the uncertainty using Bittensor's incentive architecture. In the system, onchain validators pull engagement data directly from YouTube's API, verify compliance, and issue alpha token rewards to creators.

Let's dive deeper into the industry's current problems and then explore what's cooking at Bitcast.

The System Was Built to Be Opaque

The broader creator economy is projected to reach $480 billion by 2027, but it's built on a shaky foundation, as a significant share of the industry never produces a verifiable outcome.

Agencies, for example, charge 20 to 40% of campaign spend on overhead that brands cannot audit. Creator-reported analytics arrive fragmented, delayed, and formatted differently by every channel, and are impossible to reconcile across a multi-creator campaign.

In 2025, it was estimated that nearly 15% of all influencer followers were inauthentic and brands would endure upwards of $1.3 billion in losses from influencer fraud.

On YouTube specifically, view counts that are inflated and watch times are manufactured by bots that YouTube's own systems have to spend months identifying and removing.

The structural problem is not bad actors in isolation. The entire market was architected around information asymmetry because that's where intermediaries extract value. Creators know their real audience quality. Agencies know their margins. Brands know their budgets and little else. None of these parties share a common layer of verifiable truth, so the market defaults to opacity, high fees, and slow execution.

A brand that, for example, wants to activate 50 YouTube creators simultaneously must negotiate 50 separate agreements, wait weeks for content, and piece together 50 self-reported analytics reports that were never designed to be compared to each other.

Bitcast, operating as Subnet 93 on the Bittensor network, applies a different architecture to creator marketing.

In the system, brands post content briefs, YouTube creators compete to fulfill them, and onchain validators automatically pull engagement data from YouTube's API, verify compliance via AI, and issue alpha token rewards directly to creators' wallets.

The agency, the negotiated contract, and the self-reported analytics report are all removed from the stack.

The Bitcast Architecture: Brands, Miners, and Validators

Bitcast organizes around three participant types, each with a defined role and a clear economic incentive tied to real performance.

Brands post content briefs to the Bitcast dashboard. Each brief specifies the topic, the required video format, and a boost multiplier that assigns priority weighting to that campaign relative to others running simultaneously.

Three content formats govern eligibility and reward scaling:

• Dedicated: the sponsor's topic must make up at least 80% of the video. Each YouTube account earns rewards for up to two dedicated videos per brief, at 100% of the applicable reward rate.
• Ad-Read: the sponsor's message appears as a short, distinct segment within a broader video. Eligible for up to five videos per brief per account, earning 20% of the dedicated reward rate.
• Integration: the sponsor's content is woven into the video itself, also at 20% of the dedicated rate, with per-brief video limits set by the campaign configuration.

Creators, called miners in Bittensor's framework, browse active briefs and produce YouTube videos that satisfy the stated requirements. Before publishing, they run their content through an AI pre-check tool that verifies the transcript and description against the brief's parameters. After publishing, the open-source miner software handles all subsequent performance reporting without requiring further manual input from the creator.

Validators form the trust layer that makes every output in the system credible and independently auditable. They acquire temporary OAuth tokens from creators, use those tokens to pull YouTube Analytics data directly from YouTube's API, and run an AI compliance check confirming the video addresses the brief's requirements.

The validator then signs and submits an onchain transaction to the Subnet 93 chain, issuing alpha token rewards to the creator's wallet.

The critical design constraint is that validators cannot assign rewards arbitrarily. The payout logic is coded into the subnet's protocol, meaning every reward is verifiable by any participant who chooses to examine the chain.

The Reward Mechanics That Make CPM Honest

Bitcast rewards creators using a 7-day moving average of YouTube Premium revenue, which scales with actual watch time, factors in audience demographics and geographic quality, and reflects the genuine advertising value the content generates for a brand, rather than raw view counts or impression totals that bad actors inflate easily.

For creators not yet enrolled in YouTube's Partner Program, the system estimates Premium revenue by multiplying minutes watched by 0.00005, providing a consistent floor that keeps the network accessible to smaller channels while preserving the quality signal that makes the metric useful to advertisers.

Each creator's daily USD revenue figure converts into a proportional weight relative to the subnet's total daily miner emissions, anchoring the entire reward structure to CPM, the metric the advertising industry already uses to price attention. Bitcast targets a CPM of $1,200 or above.

By denominating rewards in USD before converting to alpha token emissions, the system gives brands a performance benchmark they recognize without requiring any understanding of Bittensor's token mechanics to evaluate whether a campaign delivered value for the spend.

The reward window runs for 14 days after a video publishes, with a built-in 3-day delay that aligns with YouTube's own latency for finalizing engagement data. Each brief carries a maximum emissions cap, preventing any single high-performing campaign from capturing a disproportionate share of network rewards. Unclaimed emissions flow to the subnet treasury or burn, reducing the circulating supply of SN93 alpha token continuously.

Anti-exploitation controls address the remaining attack surface through a lookback window: each video's average daily revenue is capped at the channel's median daily revenue from the prior calendar month, a window that incorporates YouTube's own 30-day fraud detection cycle.

Artificial engagement that YouTube flags and removes during that window is automatically excluded from the payout calculation, so channels with legitimate audiences rarely encounter the cap at all. Channels manufacturing engagement, however, face compounding penalties from both YouTube's enforcement system and Bitcast's lookback logic running in parallel.

What Brands Actually Get

A traditional influencer campaign can take weeks before a single piece of content publishes.

Brand managers identify relevant channels, negotiate individual rate cards, draft and sign separate contracts with each creator, review submitted content, request revisions, and then wait for each creator to deliver their own analytics after the campaign concludes, in whatever format that creator prefers. In fast-moving crypto and Web3 markets, the opportunity cost of a long setup cycle frequently exceeds the value of the media spend itself, particularly when the window of audience attention you were trying to reach has already closed.

Bitcast replaces that pipeline with a brief. A brand posts campaign parameters, sets a budget, and the network activates immediately. Creators across languages, niches, and subscriber counts compete to produce compliant content. Only AI-verified videos become eligible for rewards, and only real engagement, measured against YouTube's own data infrastructure, determines payout.

For brands already operating inside the Bittensor ecosystem, a dedicated brief currently costs 10 TAO per campaign, with all revenue directed to public alpha buybacks and burns. DSV Fund made two separate OTC investments in Bitcast totaling $100,000, citing the model's demonstrated ability to convert verified attention into compounding network value.

The analytics advantage is equally significant. Traditional campaigns give brands fragmented data delivered by individual creators on their own schedules, in formats that cannot be directly compared or aggregated without manual work. Bitcast draws from YouTube's API rather than self-reporting, aggregates watch time, engagement depth, and audience quality data across every video in a campaign simultaneously, and surfaces the combined results through a unified dashboard updated automatically.

Campaign-wide visibility across dozens of independent creators, available in real time, is something no traditional agency or influencer platform has delivered in creator marketing before.

The Flywheel That Feeds TAO

Every video funded through a Bitcast brief explains a Bittensor subnet, a Bittensor protocol, or a Bittensor application to a wider audience.

The network is paying creators to educate the world about itself, which means audience development for the broader Bittensor ecosystem is embedded directly into the ad platform's tokenomics and compounds with every campaign that runs. Most early coverage of Bitcast focuses on the creator reward mechanics and misses the second-order effect of the advertising revenue attracting brands to Bittensor. By generating educational content about Bittensor at scale, marketing dollars spent on Bitcast generate growth for the ecosystem as a whole.

The flywheel operates across all three participant groups. More advertiser revenue generates larger creator rewards, attracting more creators, producing more content, driving more brand interest, which generates more advertiser revenue.

Token economics reinforce this loop through sustained buybacks and burns: all revenue from brand briefs funds public alpha buybacks, removing supply from circulation.

As of January 2026, Bitcast had burned nearly $630,000 worth of SN93 alpha, permanently removing 18% of issued supply. Watch-time across the network grew 60% in the final two months of 2025 alone, with the majority of the year's cumulative engagement concentrated in that final stretch, a pattern that indicates the flywheel is already accelerating ahead of the platform's largest expansion milestones.

The open-source miner architecture adds a parallel scaling mechanism through an agency model. A single miner account supports up to five YouTube channels simultaneously, allowing operators to aggregate multiple creators under one mining operation and run it as a content studio.

This structure lets the creator supply grow horizontally without requiring the Bitcast team to recruit each channel individually, eliminating the scaling bottleneck that constrains most creator platforms as they grow.

Bitcast's X integration launched in late 2025, using a PageRank-style influence graph to identify the top 300 accounts in a given niche as eligible miners. Network entry requires endorsements from accounts already participating in the system, a design choice that discourages bot infiltration and low-signal content without requiring traditional identity verification that slows onboarding. TikTok support follows in the roadmap, extending the verified-attention reward model to short-form video and the creator demographics that dominate that format.

Portals, Platforms, and What Comes Next

Bitcast's 2026 roadmap centers on two infrastructure additions that shift the network from a Bittensor-native tool into a general-purpose creator marketing platform accessible to brands with no prior crypto experience.

The first is a self-serve advertiser portal where brands from outside the Bittensor ecosystem fund campaigns, define targeting parameters, and monitor live results without requiring TAO familiarity. The second is advanced brand-to-creator matching: an AI-driven recommendation layer that pairs campaign briefs with creators whose audience profiles and demonstrated performance align most closely with each brand's objectives.

The Creator Portal already delivers real-time performance and earnings data to miners. The Advertiser Portal extends equivalent transparency to the brand side of the market, completing the information loop that traditional influencer marketing has never closed.

The no-code miner, which allows creators to join the network with nothing more than an email address, removes the technical barrier that has historically kept non-crypto YouTubers from participating.

Brothers Tom and Will Blears built Bitcast specifically to cross this gap. Will designed the Python-based architecture with YouTube's API at its core, while Tom leads brand development and creator acquisition from the marketing side.

Once the no-code miner reaches general availability, the creator supply scales independently of the team's onboarding capacity, removing the last significant operational constraint between Bitcast's current state and a network that any YouTuber on the platform can join in minutes.

For other Bittensor subnets, the opportunity is here. Bitcast is already running campaigns for subnet teams that need broader awareness among crypto audiences, and any subnet with a product worth explaining now has access to a programmatic channel with verifiable reach, transparent CPM-anchored pricing, and campaign analytics that would cost multiples TAO to assemble through any traditional agency.

Teams now have a choice between the traditional system built to obscure results and the one built to prove them.

Time to get started on that first brief.

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