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Bittensor co-founder Jacob Steeves ("Const") has published an essay outlining how he views the network’s path to decentralization and the end state of a "1,000-year Intelligence Federation."
In the post, Steeves said Bittensor has deliberately prioritized speed, iteration, and active leadership over immediate decentralization as the network continues to evolve its economic design and incentive systems for decentralized AI.
“Bittensor is currently not a decentralized protocol in the way Bitcoin is,” Steeves wrote. “It can be, and it will be... Its final ossification. Its total decentralization. Its programmatic immutability is, and will always remain, the final goal. ”
The essay arrives at a time of growing debate inside the Bittensor ecosystem over governance, validator incentives, and the pace of protocol change, particularly following recent discussions around Root Reborn.
Bart Hillerich
Acknowledging Bittensor’s Current Centralization
In his essay, Steeves drew a distinction between Bittensor’s long-term goal of programmatic immutability and the protocol’s current operating reality. While Bittensor is built on Substrate and designed with the technical foundations for decentralization, he explained that the network’s core economic and directional layer remains intentionally centralized today to prioritize the speed of iteration, which will bring the network closer, much faster, to its end state.
Moreover, he said Bittensor’s leadership has chosen to move quickly in order to refine the protocol while decentralized AI remains an emerging field.
"There is no point in decentralizing a system that doesn't yet deserve decentralization, and in the fast-moving field of AI, we have continually tacked Bittensor in the direction of better and better and better."
Comparing Bittensor’s Stage to Early Bitcoin
A central theme of the post is Steeves’ comparison between Bittensor’s current phase and Bitcoin’s early years. He argued that Bitcoin needed to be maximally decentralized from the outset because it was launched directly into the heavily controlled global financial system, while AI today remains earlier in its political and regulatory lifecycle.
In Steeves’ telling, Bittensor is building toward a future where decentralized intelligence becomes as censorship-resistant and difficult to capture as decentralized money. But he argued the network is not yet at the stage where it should “throw away the keys” and ossify itself.
“Bitcoin was no different,” he wrote, pointing to Satoshi Nakamoto’s early influence over Bitcoin’s technical direction in the network’s first years.
Steeves said he currently occupies Nakamoto's role within Bittensor, acting as the person responsible for pushing through core updates with the support of a small group of trusted collaborators, while also relying on feedback from the broader ecosystem.
Where Steeves Says Bittensor Is Already Decentralized
Steeves also noted that the Bittensor network has already decentralized some of the most important pieces.
He pointed to Bittensor’s token distribution and ecosystem structure as evidence. TAO was not pre-mined, the network has spent more than five years distributing ownership outward to participants, and builders do not need permission to launch or mine subnets.
"At an economic level, Bittensor has one of the best allocations ever achieved. Better even than Bitcoin itself, as there is no account with Satoshi's token stack on Bittensor."
Steeves further highlighted the scale of the existing distributed ecosystem, describing Bittensor as a live network of 128 subnet teams, more than 20 core validator teams, and a wide base of miners, developers, and communities.
“Bittensor is decentralized where it matters: its ownership,” he wrote.
Steeves Lays Out a Roadmap Before Full Decentralization
The most substantive section of the essay is Steeves’ outline of what he believes still needs to be built before Bittensor can become fully decentralized.
He pointed first to the role of validators, saying that the network needs to make them active, competitive allocators of capital and intelligence rather than passive participants. He linked that vision directly to last week’s Root subnet proposal, which he described as a way to transform Root into a flywheel that drives more utility into TAO.
From there, he said Bittensor also needs to make subnet liquidity pools more symmetrical by enabling both sides of the market, including borrowing and shorting. In his view, that is necessary to reduce the ease with which bad actors can manipulate the onchain signals that influence Bittensor’s incentive system and to allow markets to better determine the allocation of capital inside the network.
He also said Bittensor still needs to “turn on conviction,” giving alpha token holders stronger rights and a more formalized role in shaping the future of the subnet tokens they hold.
Bart Hillerich
Beyond those structural changes, Steeves signaled additional updates to TaoFlow and related mechanisms in the coming weeks, along with continued fine-tuning of the network’s emissions algorithms. He also said the Bittensor team plans to take a more active role in excluding ecosystem participants that are extracting value without contributing to the network.
A Rough Timeline for “Throwing the Keys Away”
Steeves said he expects Bittensor to reach the point of decentralization within roughly the next year and a half.
“We will know when it is time,” he wrote. “I expect it will be within the next year and a half.”
He described the end state as one where three core pillars (aligned incentives, optimized value allocation, and true ownership rights) work together inside a fully decentralized system. At that point, he said, the network can be fully “ossified,” made programmatically immutable, and allowed to run without centralized control.
“Its total decentralization, its programmatic immutability is, and will always remain, the final goal,” Steeves wrote.
The essay closes with a sweeping description of that ambition, calling Bittensor a future “1,000-year Intelligence Federation.”
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