Key Highlights
- TAO’s value approached $317 in March, elevating market capitalization beyond $3 billion
- Subnet 3 within Bittensor unveiled Covenant-72B, featuring 72 billion parameters trained on 70+ distributed nodes
- Covenant-72B achieved a 67.1 score on MMLU benchmarks, comparable to Meta’s Llama 2 70B performance
- Grayscale submitted an amended S-1 filing to the SEC for a passive TAO investment trust
- More than 68% of the 10.7 million circulating TAO tokens remain locked in staking
Bittensor’s TAO token experienced substantial appreciation throughout March 2026, reaching approximately $317. This upward movement elevated the network’s total market capitalization beyond the $3 billion threshold.
This price appreciation aligned with significant technological achievements within the Bittensor network. The team managing Subnet 3 introduced Covenant-72B, a language model containing 72 billion parameters that underwent training across a network of more than 70 globally distributed nodes.
Covenant-72B registered a 67.1 score on the MMLU benchmark, a widely recognized evaluation metric for large language models. This performance positions the model alongside Meta’s Llama 2 70B in terms of capability.
Industry observers viewed this release as the first compelling evidence that decentralized, permissionless AI model training can achieve results comparable to traditional centralized approaches. Previous attempts at distributed training faced skepticism regarding speed and coordination challenges.
The leading subnet token associated with this breakthrough, τemplar (SN3), experienced gains exceeding 400% over the preceding month, pushing its market capitalization to approximately $130 million.
Additional Developments Across the Bittensor Network
Activity extended throughout the wider Bittensor subnet landscape. Targon (SN4), a decentralized GPU compute platform operated by Manifold Labs, finalized a six-figure agreement to provide infrastructure for Dippy AI’s operations, which supports 8.6 million users.
The GMCI AI Index, which monitors prominent AI-focused cryptocurrency tokens, gained 48% from early February onward. Bittensor represents 24.89% of this index’s composition and served as the primary contributor to these gains.
Additional index constituents include Render (RNDR) and Artificial Superintelligence Alliance (ASI), with these three assets collectively representing over 71% of index weight. The index continues to trade 84% below its peak levels from the first quarter of 2024.
Grayscale Submits TAO Trust Filing to SEC
On April 3, 2026, Grayscale filed an amended S-1 document with the SEC for a Bittensor (TAO) Trust. The proposed trust operates as a passive investment structure holding TAO tokens, designed to provide investors with price exposure through tradable trust shares.
The current circulating supply stands at 10.7 million TAO tokens. More than 68% of this supply remains committed to staking mechanisms.
The Covenant-72B model release alongside the Grayscale regulatory filing represent the two most significant recent developments for TAO as of April 3, 2026.
