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Welcome to the third edition of the TAO Times, where we share weekly updates on all of the most important events occurring within the Bittensor ecosystem!

For validators, subnet owners, miners, token holders, & community members.

Here is what happened during the week of September 1st ↘️

Ecosystem

The v7.4.0 upgrade was delayed again, but has been scheduled to occur on Sep. 9, 2024. The upgrade will enable Ledger support, child hotkeys, and adjust the emissions schedule to reduce chain bloat.

TAO Talk Ep. #2 with Blocmates was a success! We had Tuta from Mentat Minds on to talk through this week’s highlights. You won’t want to miss Tuta’s take on how child hotkeys will unlock an array of new products, features, and enhancements for the ecosystem.

Sami Kassab launched taopill.ai, a hub for discovering, learning, and staying updated on Bittensor subnets.

Mentat Minds dropped this TAO tokenomics explainer that simplifies the fundamentals of the protocol. A great resource if you are just getting into Bittensor!

dTAO week 1 testnet rewards have been distributed. Sai & Datura were the top earners.

Subnets

Highlights

SN2 (Omron): Will integrate Jolt in today’s upgrade, which is a new RISC-V zkVM proof system developed by a16z. This update requires manual intervention from miners and validators, including installation of Rust nightly and Jolt toolchains.

SN4 (Manifold): Released Epistula, an open-source networking protocol that uses ed25519 keys for signed communications between entities. This new standard improves security through temporally cacheable signatures, reduces system bloat by eliminating dependency on specific libraries, and enhances developer flexibility by allowing implementation in any programming language.

SN8 (Taoshi): Has decreased the registration fee to 2.5 TAO and is considering removing it altogether. The subnet team also plans to ship a locally-run dashboard that will combat plagiarism and roll out a plagiarism detection system that will automatically eliminate offenders from the network. Additionally, the team is finalizing a peer-to-peer sync feature for SN8 validators that will enable direct sharing of historical data within the network, effectively eliminating the vtrust advantage of weight copiers and potentially improving the fairness of the Bittensor ecosystem if adopted by other subnet owners.

SN14 (Palaidn): Launched on SN14, offering a proactive fraud detection system for blockchain transactions, where validators create campaigns and miners analyze and report fraudulent activities, with plans to develop an open-source fraud database for future model training.

SN16 (BitAds): Has shipped BitAds V2 with conversion tracking. The update implements a sales-based reward system, where miners promote marketing campaigns and earn TAO based on actual conversions, while validators evaluate performance.

SN21 (OMEGA): Built the first open source mutli-modal Llama3 that understands image, audio, video. This model has surpassed Qwen-7B in image understanding across multiple benchmarks.

SN24 (OMEGA): Is expanding to include agentic screen recordings from Ω Focus, a desktop AI assistant, moving beyond YouTube scraping. They are seeking five active miners to test this new feature thoroughly and provide detailed feedback.