Who Is Ala Shaabana, the Bittensor Co-Founder Whose TAO Doubled After He Stepped Aside?

Ala Shaabana is the Bittensor co-founder and chief operating officer who stepped aside from his executive role on 13 February 2026, and TAO's 25 September close stood 104.37% above its last close before that announcement. He holds a doctorate from McMaster University, and he left the post alongside chief executive Jacob Steeves with both men staying in the ecosystem.

The doubling didn't hold in a straight line. TAO closed at 155.67 on 12 February, first closed above twice that level on 24 March, crossed back and forth into May and slid to 187.43 by 27 July. It closed above the line on 21 and 22 September, under it on 23 and 24 September and finished 25 September at 318.15 with 2.19% to spare. It still trades 55.46% below its December 2024 record close. The dates line up, and nothing in them proves cause.

Ala Shaabana at a Glance

Ala Shaabana Before Bittensor, From McMaster to Instacart

Shaabana came to crypto from a university lab. His doctoral thesis sits in McMaster University's MacSphere repository under handle 11375/23689. It carries the title On Platforms and Algorithms For Human-Centric Sensing, and the PDF's title page is dated October 2017. He wrote it in the Department of Computing and Software under supervisor Rong Zheng, after a master's degree in computer science at the University of Windsor. The thesis builds three cheap systems for reading the human body. XTREMIS is a portable ECG/EMG/EEG board that the thesis tested on finger movements during typing. SiCILIA infers a car passenger's clothing insulation from the cabin's thermal data, and CRONOS syncs the clocks of several sensors using only their own data streams.

In a CoinShares interview published on 16 January 2026, he described that early work as shrinking AI models to run on very small circuit boards. He called his own background "much more academic than crypto-native."

The same interview settles the employer question that other profiles of him split on. Shaabana said he joined VMware after the doctorate to work on distributed computing systems. He then moved to Instacart, and he said that's where Bittensor started as a side project before it became his full-time focus.

His co-founder took a different road into the same idea, and our profile of Google Brain engineer Jacob Steeves covers the Steeves half of the founding story.

How Ala Shaabana and Jacob Steeves Built Bittensor

Shaabana co-founded the Opentensor Foundation, which his Built In author page describes as the organization that builds and maintains the Bittensor protocol. That protocol is a peer-to-peer network that pays participants to train and operate machine-learning models.

He told CoinShares the project began with a technical question he and Steeves were chasing about AI models sharing knowledge with each other. The technology worked, he said, and the incentives were the problem. Volunteer computing projects like Folding@Home and SETI@Home spread work across many machines without paying anyone, and in his telling that is why they failed. A blockchain gave the pair a way to pay people for compute and for the intelligence it produced. SimplyTao's account puts the mainnet launch in January 2021 through the Opentensor Foundation.

The network runs as a set of subnets, each paying TAO for a different job such as storage or inference, and our guide to what Bittensor is after the TaonSquare launch maps how those subnets fit together.

Shaabana's pitch for the end state is large. "I think Bittensor could become something like TCP/IP for AI," he told CoinShares, describing a base layer most users never see. He argued that AI has a verification problem and that blockchains are built to verify work in public.

That claim has rivals, and our Sentient vs Bittensor decentralized AI token comparison sets the Bittensor design against another decentralized AI token model.

Why the Bittensor Co-Founder Stepped Aside in February 2026

SimplyTao reported on 13 February 2026 that Steeves, known in the community as Const, was stepping down as CEO of the Opentensor Foundation. The same report said Shaabana, known as ShibShib, confirmed he was also stepping aside from his executive role as COO.

Neither founder left the ecosystem, according to the report. Steeves told the community he would keep writing chain code and joining the same calls, and what he gave up was the legal authority attached to the title.

The report framed the move as an answer to the criticism Bittensor has heard longest, that the network leans too heavily on one central organization. It followed Dynamic TAO, the February 2025 redesign that brought in subnet tokens, and the network's first halving on 15 December 2025.

For a trader the change comes down to key-person risk. The two men who held the titles stayed on the network and kept building, so the people writing the code did not change, and the part that changed was who signs for the foundation.

TAO Price Since Ala Shaabana Stepped Aside

TAO's Phemex perpetual has traded since 12 April 2024, and it hit 145.75 on 11 February 2026, the lowest close of the listing. The 12 February close of 155.67 was the last price before the announcement, and the market added 14.69% on 13 February to close at 178.53. The TAO price first closed above double that pre-announcement level on 24 March at 336.43. It peaked on 25 March at 347.27, and that remains the highest close since the step aside.

Then the move came apart. TAO fell 46.03% from that March peak to 187.43 on 27 July, a close only 20.40% above the pre-announcement level. It spent 171 of the daily closes after 24 March below the doubling line of 311.34.

The recovery ran through September. TAO gained 27.15% across the seven daily bars from 250.21 on 18 September, including 7.44% on 25 September from 296.12, and it closed at 318.15. That leaves it 104.37% above the 12 February close and 118.28% above the 11 February low. The 25 September close was the third above the doubling line in five bars, after 21 and 22 September, with 23 and 24 September back under it.

The longer arc is less flattering, since the 25 September close is still 55.46% below the record close of 714.28 set on 8 December 2024.

Method: every figure in this section is a daily close of the TAO perpetual on Phemex in UTC, read from the exchange's kline feed. The 26 September bar was still trading at the time of writing, so 25 September is the last settled close.

For long-range scenarios, our Bittensor TAO price prediction for 2025 to 2030 sets out where forecasts put the token.

Trading TAO Futures on Phemex

TAO futures on Phemex run up to 50x leverage, and the contract funds every four hours. The product feed's fundingInterval field reads 14400 seconds. The contract's own description still says eight hours, and the field is the figure to trust.

That means six funding payments a day where an eight-hour contract has three, so if you hold a position through a run like March 2026, you pay or collect twice as often.

The specific risk for TAO longs is the gap to the old high. A trader who bought the December 2024 record close still needs TAO to more than double from 318.15 to get back to even. The 13 February bar moved 14.69% on the day of the announcement, which shows how far this market can travel in one daily bar.

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and is not financial advice. Cryptocurrency trading involves substantial risk. Always do your own research before making investment decisions.