Who Is Jacob Steeves, the Google Brain Engineer Who Built Bittensor?

Jacob Steeves co-founded Bittensor, the AI network whose chain has minted half a TAO every twelve seconds since its December 2025 halving. His Paris Blockchain Week speaker page lists him as chief executive of Affine, a Bittensor subnet built around reinforcement learning research.

The emission clock explains most of what the TAO chart has done. TAO closed at 232.18 on the Phemex perpetual on Monday 14 September 2026, up 0.41 percent on the session and down 10.66 percent across seven sessions. The 50-day average runs 9.46 percent under the 200-day, and the last crossing was a death cross dated 1 July 2026.

Jacob Steeves at a Glance

Who Is Jacob Steeves?

Steeves has made the case for the network under his own name for years. Fox Business interviewed him on 18 September 2023 and described him as a machine learning engineer on Google's Brain team. He told that reporter the danger was "creating an elite group of people that are going to control AI". He also said the pull of the technology builds corporations beyond the trillion-dollar range. It's the argument Bittensor's design answers, and the emission schedule is where that argument becomes arithmetic.

The Bittensor co-founder line is the one biographical claim every page that names him repeats. His Paris Blockchain Week bio calls Bittensor an open-source protocol for a decentralized machine-learning network and puts him at Affine. The speaker ribbon above that bio also carries a stray "Founder, Algorand" label the bio text never supports.

What no primary page gives you is his schooling. The essay explaining the network on the Bittensor site is bylined to a core developer alias and never names him, so the degree that circulates on profile aggregators stays out of this piece. Our guide to Bittensor and the TAO token covers the network itself.

How Did Jacob Steeves Build Bittensor?

Step one: The whitepaper hosted on the Bittensor site sets the rule. Peers rank each other by training neural networks that learn the value of their neighbors, and the ledger pays the highest-ranked peers with more network weight.

Step two: Peer ranking invites collusion, so the paper shapes the incentive to survive a cabal holding up to half the network weight. The gradient of that incentive against stake is super-linear at the midpoint, which forces a dishonest subgraph to keep buying stake to hold its ground.

Step three: Miners produce the commodity, validators score the miners, and stakers back validators with TAO. Subnet creators write the incentive mechanism for their own market, and that's why two subnets on one chain can pay for completely different work.

Step four: The dTAO upgrade of February 2025 split one token into many. Every subnet got its own alpha token with its own 21 million cap, and every existing stake position converted to root TAO stake at the switch. The chain logs the first dTAO block as 4,920,351.

The Numbers Behind the TAO Emission Schedule

Put the block time next to the block emission and the TAO emission schedule stops being abstract. At 232.18 a token, the chain hands the network about $836,000 of fresh TAO a day, against roughly $1.67 million a day before the first TAO halving. Our read on how Sentient and Bittensor price their tokens puts that beside the other large decentralized AI model.

Emission settles at epoch boundaries. Each subnet accumulates alpha and pays it out when its tempo fires, so the per-neuron emission figure the chain reports reads as a per-tempo amount and never as a rate.

Why the TAO Halving Runs on an Issuance Threshold

Bitcoin halves on a block count. Bittensor halves on a counter the chain keeps, and that counter is total issuance, so emission drops by half each time issuance crosses the midpoint of the supply still to come. The thresholds land at 10.5 million and then 15.75 million, and the first one arrived in December 2025.

The word that matters is recycled. Registration burns and native transaction fees come off the issuance counter, so the schedule can mint those tokens again, and every recycled TAO pushes the next halving further away. Burned tokens stay on the counter forever and nothing re-emits them.

A halving reaches past the TAO line. Each subnet's pool injection is a share of that same block emission, so alpha injection halves with it and every subnet's own token schedule stretches at the same moment. The chain's emissions documentation sets out both curves.

Bittensor subnet emissions are then carved up in three steps. A subnet's share starts from its price moving average, gets scaled down by the incentive its owner withheld, and passes through a gate whose midpoint is the 32nd-highest share on the board.

Nothing in that chain of steps responds to a press release.

What Bittensor TAO Staking Does to Your Position

Bittensor TAO staking is a swap, and that single fact decides everything downstream. Your TAO sells into the subnet's pool and you hold that subnet's alpha, so the position's TAO value floats with the pool price from the moment the trade settles.

The pool holds two reserves and a pair of weights that start at 0.5 each, where the price collapses to the plain reserve ratio. The protocol can add liquidity off-ratio by shifting those weights without shifting the price, which is the reason the pools are weighted at all.

Fees come off the input side at 33 parts in 65,535, roughly five basis points, and the block author collects them. There's no unbonding period, so the TAO you unstake is spendable straight away.

Root staking is the exception most traders miss. Stake on the root network converts one for one with no swap fee and no price impact, and a front-runner has nothing to sandwich. Subnet stake is a position in a thin market that pays out in the subnet's own token, and the work those subnets sell is the machine intelligence our explainer on AI agents in cryptomaps out.

What Traders Should Watch on Bittensor Subnet Emissions

• The next halving threshold at 15.75 million in total issuance, which slides further out every time a registration fee returns to the counter.

• The 50-day at 216.59 against the 200-day at 239.23 on 14 September. That 9.46 percent gap has to close before the 1 July 2026 death cross reverses, and our guide to moving average crossovers works through the reading.

• The Federal Reserve decision at 18:00 UTC on 16 September, which lands thirteen hours after this page publishes and sets the risk tone for every high-beta AI token on the board.

• The funding field on the Phemex TAO perpetual reads 14,400 seconds and the written contract description on the same product still says eight hours. Four hours is the number that bills you.

How to Trade the Trends Jacob Steeves Represents

Via crypto futures: Phemex lists TAO/USDT perpetual futures with leverage up to 50x, and the funding field on that contract reads four hours. Our explainer on how a perpetual futures contract works covers the mechanics before you size anything.

Via spot: TAO has traded as a spot pair on Phemex since 5 March 2024, five weeks before the perpetual listed on 12 April 2024. The spot pair closed at 232.60 on 14 September, 0.18 percent above the perpetual on the same bar.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who wrote the Bittensor whitepaper?

The paper hosted on the Bittensor site carries one byline, Yuma Rao, and it never names Steeves. A title on an aggregator profile doesn't change what the document says.

How many validators can set weights on a Bittensor subnet?

The chain recalculates permits every epoch and hands them to the top 128 neurons by stake weight, with a default activity cutoff of 5,000 blocks.

What is the smallest TAO stake the chain accepts?

The default minimum is 0.002 TAO plus the swap fee. An account that falls under the 500-rao existential deposit is reaped and its remaining dust destroyed.

How high has TAO closed on Phemex?

The highest daily close on the Phemex perpetual since it listed on 12 April 2024 is 714.28 on 8 December 2024, and the 14 September close runs 67.5 percent under it.

What can traders learn from Jacob Steeves?

Read the schedule before the chart. The gate that ranks subnet emissions carries a default exponent of 3, so a weak subnet's share falls away smoothly and never in one step.

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.