Bittensor co-founder accuses Covenant AI founder of betraying the community and plans to launch a locked staking mechanism

Bittensor co-founder Jacob Robert Steeves responded to the Covenant AI incident, stating that he was "deeply shocked" by the events of the past few days and accused Covenant AI founder Samuel Dare of causing serious harm to the protocol and community, betraying the trust of investors and users. He apologized to users who suffered losses due to the incident.

Steeves stated that the original intention of Bittensor was to combat greed and selfishness in human nature, promoting AI to be collectively owned by all participants through a permissionless mechanism. He emphasized that while this incident exposed vulnerabilities in the system, it would also encourage the protocol and community to further enhance their risk resilience.

Regarding future directions, Steeves proposed advancing the "Locked Stake" mechanism, introducing a "time + stake" commitment dimension at the protocol layer to improve transparency and investor protection, thereby reducing similar risks. He noted that this plan was originally designed with the participation of Samuel Dare.

Additionally, he mentioned that the development related to subnets 3, 39, and 81 would continue to be driven by the community, and the overall functionality and vision would not change. Steeves emphasized that Bittensor remains one of the most decentralized AI protocols currently and will continue to promote the development of open AI, with plans to move towards training larger-scale models. In the future, they will train a 1 trillion parameter model.