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TAO.com has clarified how it presents wallet fees after user questions about whether its Bittensor wallet was free and how swap charges are displayed.
In a post on X, the TAO.com team said its wallet shows users an estimated total fee before they confirm a swap and the final total fee afterward. The team said the fee shown in its example included three components: a protocol fee of 0.001630106T, an MEV fee of 0.000189191T and TAO.com's own fee of 0.003T, or 0.3%.
The clarification centers on how TAO.com bundles those charges for users. Instead of itemizing the protocol, MEV and wallet fees separately in the transaction flow, the team said it deliberately shows a single all-in figure. They say that most users care more about the final cost of the transaction than the underlying fee categories, especially when terms such as MEV may be unfamiliar to nontechnical users.
The update also addressed an outdated FAQ on TAO.com's site that still described the wallet as free. TAO.com said the page was stale and has since been corrected. The team emphasized that the outdated wording appeared on the website FAQ, not inside the wallet transaction flow, and said users have consistently seen the total fee before confirming transactions.
TAO.com also pointed to an earlier transparency effort involving Taostats. According to the post, co-founder Garrett Oetken, also known as Carrot, contacted Taostats on July 14 and asked the analytics platform to label the wallet that collects TAO.com's fees "for transaction transparency." TAO.com said Taostats did not make the change.
Moreover, TAO.com said the revenue from wallet fees is outweighed by its operating and ecosystem costs.
The team cited more than $200,000 spent on security audits, $200,000 paid to bring USDC to Bittensor through LayerZero infrastructure, about $500,000 provided to support the launch of TAO on Solana, ongoing cloud infrastructure expenses, engineering and design work, and funding for a full-time Rust engineer on the Opentensor Foundation's Nucleus team.
