Table of Contents
Handshake58, the Bittensor subnet focused on payment infrastructure for autonomous AI agents, announced it will step away from Subnet 58, opening the slot for a new team to take its place.
In a statement shared publicly, the team emphasized that its departure does not reflect a loss of confidence in Bittensor itself.
“We fully believe in Bittensor and the infrastructure we have built,” the team wrote. “However, we do not believe we are best positioned to maximize the unique incentive mechanisms of mining and validation that makes Bittensor and subnet slots so valuable.”
Handshake58 launched with a goal to build payment rails for autonomous AI systems, looking to address a growing bottleneck in agentic AI by enabling trustless micropayments between machines, thereby allowing agents to autonomously pay for services such as inference, compute, APIs, and data access without requiring human approval for every transaction.
Antonio Verrico
The project combined payment channels settled in USDC on Polygon with a Bittensor-based trust layer, where validators could assess service reliability through cryptoeconomic incentives. The broader vision was to give AI agents infrastructure for machine-to-machine commerce, something traditional payment systems are not designed to support.
The team thanked investors, miners, validators, and contributors who supported the subnet during its development.
Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial, investment, or trading advice. The information provided should not be interpreted as an endorsement of any digital asset, security, or investment strategy. Readers should conduct their own research and consult with a licensed financial professional before making any investment decisions. The publisher and its contributors are not responsible for any losses that may arise from reliance on the information presented.
