📸 Market Snapshot: While the AI agent sector kept dragging amid broader tariff tensions, Bittensor’s subnet tokens broke away from the pack—many posted triple-digit gains this week even as $TAO itself slipped ~10%.
The market’s clearly shifting toward deeper subnet speculation, fueled by a series of factors. These foundations include:
Subnet market dynamics are maturing: Bittensor ecosystem researcher @0xWash identifies three waves so far: initial hype in February on the dTAO launch, a shakeout in March, and now a third phase driven by actual products, partnerships, and deeper liquidity. Investors are starting to separate signal from noise. (h/t Tao Times).
TaoFi going live: With dTAO in motion, entirely new markets are forming with new infrastructure like TaoFi going live. Through Hyperlane, $USDC can now be bridged to Bittensor EVM as $taoUSD, swapped for $sTAO, or used to LP. While early, DeFi like this could draw bigger capital flows to subnets, deepening their liquidity and helping them grow even more.
Pre-Conference Hype: With Bittensor’s first large-scale conference, Endgame, now just around the corner, the recent rally in ecosystem tokens may be fueled by excitement for the event and potential announcements there. It’s not uncommon for tokens to rally into big conferences, and while $TAO may be being left out for now, momentum could shift in its favor soon.
Token prices as of 3pm ET
24hr
7d
VIRTUALS $0.45
↗ 0.1%
↘ 16.1%
AI16Z $0.14
↘ 8.5%
↘ 19.6%
ARC $0.04
↗ 12.9%
↘ 13.1%
. . .
AI ROLLUP
Prompt-Powered Future
The internet just got Ghiblified—and the AI world may never be the same.
OpenAI’s dreamy new image model has flooded feeds with Studio Ghibli vibes, rocketing the company to 1 million new users in just the first hour after the model's release.
In this episode, David and Ejaaz break down how OpenAI stole the spotlight, why CoreWeave’s IPO signals an AI infrastructure boom, and what Elon’s xAI acquisition of X means for the future of context-aware agents.
Plus, Google quietly dropped a model that might be the best yet (though few noticed), and Cursor raised $625M to usher in the era of “vibe coding” and Model Context Protocols.
Don’t miss the breakdown. Watch the full episode now! 👇
As AI drives the cost of producing content to nearly zero, it’s now doing the same for software—ushering in what ex-Tesla AI director and OpenAI founding member Andrej Karpathy calls “vibe coding.”
The idea is simple: use AI tools like Claude, Cursor, or Replit to quickly whip up a project, refine it just enough, and ship it. That means:
While clearly a technical shift, vibe coding with AI is equally a cultural one, shifting software from something precious and demanding months of careful crafting to an experience of speed, experimentation, and iteration. Its scrappiness fits well with crypto, a space that turns on remix, rapid creation, and building in public.
All this gives way to a world where software is spun up as quickly as content, goes viral as quickly as content, and is made all the more engaging by (hopefully) unique financial features.
Software as Content, Crypto as the Canvas
If vibe coding makes software feel like content—quick, creative, shared—crypto is the perfect place to publish it.
This line of thinking builds on a recent conversation with Dan Romero and Ted of Farcaster. Our space thrives on open-source norms, visible smart contracts, and forkable protocols. You can tweak a frontend, attach a token, and launch in hours. It’s not without risks (rushed contracts can lead to costly exploits), but the synergy is obvious:
AI training data: Provides AI tools a good foundation of training data to learn from, which is part of what makes vibe coding even possible.
Social & financial playground: Establishes a social, financial, and technical playground where ideas are quickly shared, reshaped, and turned into something new, perfectly matching the vibe coding spirit.
It’s not a coincidence that crypto’s most popular and engaging apps are simple and social. Apps like friend.tech (rip), Crypto the Game, and Yapster—even memecoins—all thrive on community buzz, making speculation fun, and moving quickly through cultural cycles.
Yes, these apps weren’t vibe coded, but they prove that crypto and its financial toolkit stand primed to mesh with the kind of quick, expressive software that vibe coding enables.
A prime example is Farcaster, a decentralized social protocol that embeds Mini Apps (previously Frames) into its feed. Devs there release token drops, diaries, or trading games in days, often just for fun. As a result, it’s become a hub for vibe coding.
the simplest bull case for farcaster is that we’ll need an app-native feed as software becomes content, vibecoding becomes the new posting, and the number of applications being released 1000x's
We’ve seen a similar shift in music: once albums became basically free, the real money moved to live shows, exclusive access, merch drops, and brand deals—all the experiences around the music.
In short, the content still mattered, but the business moved to everything that couldn’t be easily copied or streamed.
Now, as code becomes cheap, the “value” shifts to the experience around the app, created and fueled by tokens, speculation, exclusivity, and social hype.
NFTs are turning into a superior form of entertainment.
Better than Netflix, better than some games, better than fantasy sports.
Speculating on tokens: Tracking a token’s price becomes entertainment in itself. Whole communities do, and will continue to, form around chart-watching and meme-fueled runs.
Exclusive access: Like backstage passes, devs can issue NFTs for early access, private chats, or premium features, queue Crypto the Game or Freysa, etc.
Hype as the product: Sometimes the hype is the product. A new Mini App drops, and suddenly the timeline lights up with people using it, remixing it, and guessing whether it’ll take off. See Pump.fun and all its clones.
Music data underscores this: By 2017, top artists were earning ~80% of their income from touring, while only ~15% came from recorded music. And the trend hasn’t slowed down. Global revenue from live tours continues to hit new highs, showing that when the content becomes free, value lives in experiences.
The Path Ahead
Put this all together, and you get a pretty clear picture: software is getting cheaper and faster to build, and crypto gives it built-in incentives and social reach, while open-source development is pouring gas on the fire.
Of course, this all comes with caveats. Vibe coding in crypto isn’t risk-free, especially when smart contracts are involved. And for many builders, AI still struggles with blockchain-specific code. As 0xDesigner joked, “If you’re in infra, pivot to vibe code infra … you’ll make a killing from me alone.”
Yet, in the wake of DeepSeek, and as more major tech companies open-source models and software, it becomes even easier to remix, rework, and republish software—i.e. vibe code.
That means more tools, more codebases, more learning material—all of which shortens the distance between having an idea and launching something new. It’s not hard to imagine a world where spinning up an app is as simple as making a meme. In many ways, we’re already there.
Crypto fits into this perfectly, imbuing software with the financial and cultural energy that turns an idea into a living, breathing experience. Tokens, NFTs, loyalty points—they’re not just features, they’re ways of making software and its experience social, valuable, and fun.
And when you combine the two—cheap, fast code with crypto’s built-in speculation machine—you get an environment primed for casual, expressive, internet-native experiments to thrive. The apps don’t need to be perfect. They just need to be interesting, social, and alive.
Experience the next generation of onchain finance with Mantle—where blockchain meets everyday banking. Powered by a $4B treasury, Mantle Network, and mETH Protocol, Mantle is launching three innovation pillars:
Not financial or tax advice. Bankless content is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This newsletter is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research.
Disclosure. From time to time, we may add links in this newsletter to products we use. We may receive a commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless team holds crypto assets.
