A major governance shock has rocked the Bittensor ecosystem, triggering a sharp 10% correction in TAO's price as one of its most prominent subnet developers abruptly exits. Covenant AI, the team behind the historic Covenant-72B decentralized LLM pre-training run, publicly severed ties with Bittensor on Thursday, sparking immediate selling pressure and raising fundamental questions about the network's stability. The abrupt departure has transformed short-term price predictions bearish, with TAO plummeting 17% within six hours as traders reassess the project's decentralized AI thesis amid this high-profile defection.

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.

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.

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, 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 raisedat a current price of, with staking available for early participants. The project’s Decentralized Canonical Bridge handles BTC transfers natively.