What is Bittensor, and how do you read it?
A plain-language guide to the network this site indexes: what the token is, who the players are, how a subnet actually makes money, and what every column on dTAOscan means. If a term here is fuzzy, that is the point of this page.
Bittensor is the network: a proof-of-intelligence blockchain where independent operators compete to produce useful AI work. Its own layer-1 chain is called Subtensor.
TAO is the native token of that network, the way ETH is the token of Ethereum.
dTAO ("dynamic TAO") is the 2025 upgrade that gave every subnet its own token, called an alpha token, each with its own on-chain market. So "Bittensor" is the network, "TAO" is the coin, and "dTAO" is the per-subnet token economy that this site indexes. The prices you see are alpha priced in TAO.
The marketplace in one picture
A subnet is a marketplace for one specific digital commodity. One subnet sells LLM inference, another sells web scraping, another price prediction, another storage, and so on. There are roughly 129 of them, each a small economy running every block. Three roles keep each one honest:
Bring the actual work: run the model, serve the scrape, produce the prediction. They compete on quality. The best-scored miners earn the most alpha; the worst can be deregistered and lose their slot. They put up a registration cost to get a slot (a UID).
Bring stake and judgment: they test the miners and score them. Their scores decide who gets paid. A validator's influence is proportional to the TAO staked to it, so scoring is expensive to fake.
Defines the task and the reward rule (the "incentive mechanism") and runs the subnet. They take a fixed cut of everything the subnet emits. They also put up a recoverable registration burn to launch the subnet.
Every block, the network mints new alpha for each subnet and splits it 41% to miners, 41% to validators, 18% to the owner. That split is why running a good subnet is a business: usage attracts stake, stake concentrates emissions, emissions are income.
Are the nodes permissionless? Are they companies?
Yes, permissionless. Anyone can register a miner or a validator, or launch a subnet, by paying the on-chain cost. No application, no gatekeeper. Identities are pseudonymous hotkeys (wallet addresses), so a node can be one person on a gaming PC or a funded company running a fleet. You cannot always tell which from the chain, and that ambiguity is itself something worth tracking. What you bring as a node is capacity (compute, stake, or a novel task); what you get back is a share of that subnet's alpha emissions, which is only worth holding if the subnet's alpha holds value.
Why staking is a trade, not a deposit (the newcomer trap)
Staking TAO into a subnet is not a savings account. Each subnet has an automated market maker (AMM) pool holding TAO on one side and alpha on the other. When you "stake," you are swapping TAO for that subnet's alpha at the current pool price, and you take slippage on the way in and the way out. The price you see, alpha in TAO, is simply the pool's TAO reserve divided by its alpha reserve. On a thin pool a large exit moves the price against you, so a headline market cap is theoretical, not the amount you could actually cash out. This is the single most misunderstood thing in the ecosystem, and it is why we surface pool depth and owner-exit signals.
How to read every number on dTAOscan
Alpha priced in TAO, read straight from the subnet's AMM pool (TAO reserve / alpha reserve). Read against USD using the TAO price at the top.
Price move over the trailing window, up to 24h as history accrues. Green up, red down.
The TAO sitting in the subnet's pool. This is depth: how much real liquidity backs the price and how badly a big exit would slip.
Price times total issued alpha (pool + staked). The field-standard "market cap." It is comparable across subnets but theoretical on thin pools, not exit value.
How many UIDs (miner + validator slots) are registered on the subnet. A rough proxy for how contested it is.
Our Owner Watch: "locked" means the owner's alpha is committed under Conviction; "unwinding" means a material share is in a decaying lock, i.e. the owner has started pulling value out. That signal was invisible before, and it is how a quiet owner exit shows up early.
Who is bigger, who is smaller
Sort the table by mcap for the alpha the market values most, or watch Deepest pools on the front page for the subnets with the most real TAO liquidity behind them (the two are not always the same, which is itself a signal). The total alpha market cap tile sums every subnet's issued alpha, excluding root, so you can size the whole dTAO economy at a glance.
What "from the chain itself" means, precisely
dTAOscan queries Subtensor storage directly over public node RPC (state_queryStorageAt), decodes the raw SCALE-encoded values itself, and stamps every page and API response with the exact block of the read. No third-party data API, no other explorer, no submitted forms sit between the chain and what you see. Two honest boundaries: pages serve from a 5-minute snapshot cache rather than a per-request chain read, and TAO/USD is an off-chain exchange median, labeled as such. Cross-check any price against the chain or any other explorer: it matches to six decimals because it is the same storage.
How dTAOscan compares to taostats, TaoMarketCap and Subnet Alpha
taostats is the official Bittensor block explorer and the deepest network-wide dataset; TaoMarketCap and Subnet Alpha track subnet prices and directories. dTAOscan takes a different position in that field:
Every dTAOscan API response carries an Ed25519 receipt over the exact payload bytes. You verify against /keys.json offline; you never have to trust our database. No other Bittensor explorer signs its data.
The full directory, per-subnet depth, validator overlap, and ecosystem totals as JSON with no signup. OpenAPI, api-catalog, agent-skills index, and llms.txt make it consumable by an agent without a human in the loop.
Owner Conviction lock and unwinding (the exit signal), UID saturation, and the cross-subnet validator graph: chain-truth signals that a price directory does not surface.
The API serves everything on this site as signed JSON, Synergy maps the validator graph, and the directory is the live board. Nothing here is investment advice.