The person who helped ME increase by 90% is now the one causing the stock price collapse.

TAO stock price suddenly dropped 15% today, currently around $277, with a downward trend.
The sudden price decline may have been caused by an open letter.
The letter was written by Sam Dare, founder of Covenant AI. Bittensor is currently the most valuable project in the AI+Crypto space, and Covenant AI is the most important subnet development team within its ecosystem.
Last month, this team achieved a major milestone: using consumer hardware from over 70 contributors, they ran a large model with 72 parameters, Covenant-72B, hailed as the largest decentralized AI training process in history.
A month ago, this event made TAO the hottest story in the entire crypto community, giving it the feel of an AI lighthouse.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang publicly praised it, and Silicon Valley investor Chamath also mentioned it specifically on his podcast, noting that $TAO even increased 90% in a month, which is quite impressive amid the current bear market.
But today, Sam Dare announced that he and his team would leave Bittensor, fundamentally breaking this story.

Sam Dare’s open letter is quite lengthy, but the core accusations revolve around one thing:
Jacob Steeves, founder of Bittensor ( known by the nickname Const in the industry ), controls the entire network himself; decentralization is just a facade.
In his letter, he listed a series of actions, among the most brutal are: first, directly suspending the issuance of the Covenant subnet, which effectively reduces the team’s income to zero; and second, conducting large-scale token sell-offs during the conflict to exert pressure and force compliance through market measures.
The Tao Papers whistleblowing website, launched today, provides even stronger evidence. According to on-chain data published on the site, Bittensor has undergone 41 network upgrades from 2023 to 2026. Of these, 38 upgrades—from proposal to signing and deployment—originated from infrastructure controlled by Const. The remaining two signatures were made within minutes after each upgrade, with no public discussion records.
The so-called “governance committee” of three people is essentially one decision-maker and two signatories.
The fact that Sam published the open letter and the whistleblowing website on the same day clearly shows this was not a spontaneous decision.
In contrast, just two months earlier, Bittensor’s founder, Const, announced his resignation as CEO of Opentensor Foundation (, the development organization behind Bittensor ), citing his push for decentralization.
Meanwhile, after Sam announced leaving the team, on-chain data shows he sold all 37,000 TAO tokens, fueling more false rumors in the market.

So far, Const’s only response to all this has been one sentence, essentially meaning that Covenant’s departure is actually a good thing, as it will create autonomous subnet networks that don’t rely on any team.
He has not responded to the accusations made by Sam Dare. But whether it’s conflict or contribution, the market has already reflected it in the price.
In March, TAO’s price nearly doubled, from about $170 to $337. According to The Block, TAO increased over 50% in two weeks after Covenant-72B was released, becoming the biggest catalyst for the overall 90% rally.
CovenantAI is linked to the Templar, Basilica, and Grail subnets (sn3, sn39, and sn81). These subnet tokens are linked to TAO through a staking mechanism. When news of Covenant-72B was announced, the value of these subnet tokens surged up to 400%, and TAO also increased accordingly.
Thus, buyers of TAO are essentially purchasing a decentralized AI network with hundreds of subnets, but the price structure tells a different story; nearly half of the price increase is tied to a single group.
“The covenant built us, and the covenant also destroyed us.” This phrase is widely referenced today, but most people only understand its superficial meaning.
More thought-provoking is why a network claiming to have 125 subnets relies on a few subnets to push prices up during rallies and also depends on those same subnets to cause sharp declines during downturns. Other subnets hardly influence these two market cycles.
Bittensor’s decentralized model has been established for three years, but its price structure has always appeared centralized. As for who is right or wrong in this debate, I think that’s not the main issue.
Every ecosystem has excellent teams, and any excellent team can leave.
The hard question is, what will you do to solve this problem?
In a bear market, internal conflicts among crypto project teams are not unusual. When the market lacks hot topics, a project’s success or failure depends entirely on whether there’s a story to attract attention. Covenant-72B is one of the best stories this year: Jensen Huang’s positive evaluation, TAO’s doubling in value, and the community feeling that decentralized AI has finally created a formidable competitor.
However, the inherent problem with price increases driven by storytelling is that those who create the story can also destroy it. When prices rise, it’s seen as a beacon of hope for the crypto market; when prices fall, it’s viewed as a group of people fleeing. For TAO buyers, 90% profit and 15% loss today all originate from the same source.
This may be the most difficult real-world investment dilemma in the current crypto world. Prices always fluctuate based on unexpected stories, and these stories are tied to key figures.
As long as people are alive, the story continues; once they leave, you might not even find someone to talk to.