Top Story: The takeover that ran on rails
The rare event finally landed. Subnet 3 (Teutonic) changed owners through the protocol: const stacked enough conviction alpha to clear the new, lower threshold and took the subnet within minutes of Spec 446 merging. SN39 and SN81 followed the same day. By every count that matters, it's the second or third conviction takeover ever done by the new rules.
— Pewpewlazer making the case that a decentralized LLM is the whole point of the network, three 🔥 behind him.
Subnet Spotlight: KubeTEE (SN90) sold its spare compute cheap
An honest "surplus capacity, priced to move" story and it worked. KubeTEE, a confidential-compute platform (models run in encrypted enclaves, called TEEs), ran a free window first and let the subnet soak it: 14.8 billion tokens of live traffic found the rough edges no internal test would. That work is in production on SN28 sayGM now, with glm-5.2 at 64% below retail and deepseek-v4-flash at 20% off.
Then the operator dropped the flex this weekend: a 397B-parameter model (ornith-1.5, NVFP4) deployed onto SN90, free to test, clocking 150 to 215+ tokens a second under load. The channel response was basically "WOW. It's FAST." Spare GPUs that used to sit unused are now selling inference.
— Pierre on SN90 confirming the 14.8B-token free window, the two discounted models, and that SN28 gets idle capacity only.
Subnet Spotlight: Green Compute (SN110) answered the rug question with invoices
Channels have been grilling SN110 on whether it's a rug. The operator, Supajosh, answered by pointing at the business he already runs: ten years in crypto, a public persona, and a hardware operation with seven-figure invoices. "id be foolish to run away with a pocket full of tao and destroy 10 years of good reputations." Buybacks sit in a wallet he owns outright, and he's open about the mechanism, burn, conviction lock, extra sales hires.
It landed because the bar has been set by everyone else locking and burning alpha for a year. A man standing in front of a hardware business he'd have to torch in order to rug reads differently.
— Supajosh on the 7-figure invoices, and travis conceding locks are what put the worry to bed.
Sentiment Roundup
Hot: ReadyAI (SN33) shipped a validator hotfix the same day miners raised complaints. Swarm (SN124) kept tightening its Interceptor crown, top score now 0.9949 against a 0.999 cap that pays one model the family's whole 30%. MVTRX (SN79) put its exchange live on a mainnet-seeded chain. Numinous (SN6) widened to 275 markets. Vocence (SN78) answered a scam accusation to the face and pointed at paying users.
Cold: greevils (SN58) flipped to a buyback pool after telling the channel to mine open-source and nobody tried; the channel's answer was "nobody cares." minotaur (SN112) is getting grilled over selling 250k of owner alpha days after signalling a lock (the team points at 100k in conviction, the channel isn't buying it). Trishool (SN23) participation slid hard, 82 hotkeys in P3-001 down to 20 in P3-004. Astrid (SN127) paid nobody in Showdown 4 and is now building a local replay tool so miners can trace the mismatch instead of waiting in silence.
Numbers That Matter
14.8B — tokens KubeTEE's free window pushed through the rough edges
64% / 20% — off retail, glm-5.2 and deepseek-v4-flash served from SN90 idle capacity
82 → 20 — Trishool hotkeys, P3-001 to P3-004; 629 submissions down to 48
50 → 25 → 12.5 — Harnyx's new champion payout, halving every batch unless someone novel bumps it (10x for novelty)
0.9949 — Swarm's Interceptor champion score, chasing a 0.999 cap
200 → 275 — markets Numinous now tracks
94.6% — of SOMA's board scored lower in stage 2 after an upstream model swap mid-competition
Notable Quotes
"id be foolish to run away with a pocket full of tao and destroy 10 years of good reputations."
— Supajosh, Green Compute (SN110)
"the time you and all the miners have taken to participate, that is not lost on anyone in the team."
— Astrid (SN127), after a Showdown that paid nobody out
"I won't make something up."
— a Nodexo (SN106) team lead, on an 8-hour canary stall he couldn't see into
Human Moment
The Nepher (SN49) channel had the understated best exchange of the week. A miner cleared 100% success at high speed, and the team told him straight: "Tbh, I didn't expect you to achieve a 100% success rate at such a high speed." They're keeping his winning submission private because it's that valuable, with paid downloads coming in three tiers.
Coming Up
MANTIS (SN123): FLOW trading contest is live with zero emissions until Sept 14, then it takes 25% of the subnet. Four weeks of runway to clear the 1.25σ gate.
MVTRX (SN79): mainnet SWAP is the target this week; the Hangar's open for building and running trading agents.
Humanoid Olympics (SN1): Macrocosmos opened six physics-sim events for one Unitree G1 controller across them all: 100m, 400m, hurdles, high and long jump, triple jump.
Vidaio (SN85): the next competition round relaunches after infra fixes; reviews of the last one read by hand.
Conjectures (SN66): hunting funding for the proving-ground push, eyeing an $18M "AI for math" grant round. The payoff question is on the table: when success is machine-verifiable, the proof itself is the answer.
Worth Your Time
taoswap.org/explore/subnets — the live subnet map with prices, 7D, mcap, and the countdown showing how many days until a new conviction takeover flips ownership. Watch it since the rules just changed.
taostats.io — the official block explorer and validator analytics, still the most useful single pane for staking and subnet discovery.
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