Bittensor token price has collapsed by 17% in less than 6 hours after one of the network’s most prominent subnet developers publicly torched its relationship with the ecosystem, and the price prediction is getting bearish. The governance bombshell driving this selloff raises a harder question than most traders are asking right now.
On Thursday, Covenant AI, the team behind the Covenant-72B model, widely credited as the largest decentralized LLM pre-training run in history, announced its exit from Bittensor.
Founder Sam Dare stated that “the promise that drew builders, miners, validators, and investors into this ecosystem is a lie,” accusing co-founder Jacob Steeves of asserting centralized control over Covenant’s subnet after it grew too prominent to ignore.
Steeves has not publicly responded. The statement hit markets like a circuit breaker. TAO had surged 140% over six weeks, with 105% of those gains coming since March 8 alone, largely on the back of Covenant-72B’s success narrative and Grayscale’s filing for a TAO Trust. That entire credibility stack just developed a serious crack.
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Bittensor Price Prediction: Can TAO Recover?
At current levels near $280, TAO sits in genuinely dangerous technical territory. $300 was the immediate support level, and the price is already trading below it, which means the level has effectively been lost.
On-chain data confirms the severity of the move, with TAO’s 24-hour decline registering among the steepest in the large-cap AI token sector. The April 9 rejection at $360 resistance preceded a bearish MACD crossover, with sellers already positioning before the news dropped.
Social dominance for TAO reached a one-year high in early April, yet retail sentiment shows only 1.5 positive comments per negative comment, suggesting conviction in the prior rally was thinner than price action implied.
TAO needs to reclaim $300 within 48 hours on a credible response from Steeves or Bittensor’s governance structure for it to stage a recovery toward $320–$330. But continued silence from leadership and further subnet departures can accelerate selling pressure toward $250 or lower.
The parallel to other ecosystem selloffs triggered by major internal exits suggests recoveries can take weeks, not days. Watch the $300 level; this is the line.
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Bitcoin Hyper Draws Early Movers as TAO Tries to Recover
Governance risk just repriced TAO’s entire decentralization premium, and that’s the precise vulnerability traders with longer memory have warned about. When a network’s core value proposition gets called a lie by its most successful builder, rotating capital doesn’t wait for confirmation. It moves.
One destination attracting that rotated attention is Bitcoin Hyper ($HYPER), a Bitcoin Layer 2 project positioning itself as the first-ever BTC chain with Solana Virtual Machine (SVM) integration.
The pitch is structural: Bitcoin’s security and liquidity combined with sub-Solana-speed smart contract execution, breaking through BTC’s native limitations of slow transactions, high fees, and zero programmability. No governance triumvirate. No subnet politics.
The presale has raised $32 million at a current price of $0.0136, with staking available for early participants. The project’s Decentralized Canonical Bridge handles BTC transfers natively.
Research Bitcoin Hyper before the next price step triggers.
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