chiming in hear as previously worked at $near and now have been building a subnet on $tao for past 2+ years. near has done great job recently: - executed cleanly w/ better tokenomics (huge), intents delivering real PMF (best product they've launched by far, shoutout @chronear + team), and a sharp agentic narrative that's resonating right now - market is rewarding clear, simple stories in the goldfish-attention environment of crypto. agents are hot. - cracked ai team working on their ai stack. - bittensor breadth can sometimes read as everything and nothing to outsiders. We should own that perception issue instead of attacking the messenger. that said, bittensor is still the leader in actual AI progress and innovation across the entire crypto space. near built a great L1 (no downtime in 4+ years is insane) with AI capabilities on top. could this lead to being the financial rails for agent? maybe, but also many other competitors there like coinbase bittensor built the first incentive protocol that actually coordinates capital and talent toward solving the hardest AI problems in a decentralized way, and it’s still delivering the most real development: @tplr_ai pushing decentralized training forward, major TEE breakthroughs from @manifoldlabs , @webuildscore advanced CV work, and dozens of other subnets shipping useful intelligence every week. the fundamental primitive of yuma consensus, incentizing useful work at scale, remains the powerful and important innovation in crypto recently. long-term the market prices the real thing. in current tech landscape velocity is the only moat. bittensor must keep innovating, improving, and honing market perception.

biggest bullish thing for both projects are that the founders are still in the trenches. both are unwilling to die