Bittensor Co-Founder Accuses Covenant AI Founder of Community Betrayal, Proposes "Staking Lockup" Mechanism to Strengthen Governance

BlockBeats News, April 12th, Bittensor co-founder Jacob Robert Steeves responded to the Covenant AI incident, stating that the recent events had left them "deeply shaken." He blamed Covenant AI founder Samuel Dare's actions for 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 Bittensor's original design was to combat greed and selfishness in human nature, driving AI to be collectively owned by all participants through a permissionless mechanism. He emphasized that while the incident exposed vulnerabilities in the system, it would also drive 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 level to enhance transparency and investor protection, and mitigate similar risks. He pointed out that this proposal was originally designed with the involvement of Samuel Dare.

Furthermore, he mentioned that the development related to Subnets 3, 39, and 81 would continue to be driven by the community, with no change in overall functionality and vision. Steeves stressed that Bittensor remains one of the most decentralized AI protocols currently and will continue to promote open AI development, with plans to move towards training larger-scale models. The future involves training a 1 trillion parameter model.