Bittensor co-founder accuses Covenant AI founder of betraying the community, plans to introduce a lockup staking mechanism to strengthen governance

Gate News message, April 12, Bittensor co-founder Jacob Robert Steeves posted a response regarding the Covenant AI incident, accusing Covenant AI founder Samuel Dare of causing serious harm to the protocol and the community through his actions, betraying investors’ and users’ trust, betraying everyone, and apologizing to users who suffered losses due to the incident. Steeves said that Bittensor’s original design intent was to counter greed and selfishness in human nature by using a permissionless mechanism to enable AI to be collectively owned by all participants. Although this incident exposed the system’s vulnerabilities, it will also push the protocol and community to further enhance their ability to withstand risks. Regarding future direction, Steeves proposed advancing the “Locked Stake” mechanism, introducing a “time + stake” commitment dimension at the protocol layer to improve transparency and protect investors, and to reduce risks like this. This plan was originally developed with Samuel Dare’s involvement. In addition, development related to subnets 3, 39, and 81 will be continued by the community, and the overall functionality and vision will not change. Steeves emphasized that Bittensor is still one of the most decentralized AI protocols today, and that it will continue to promote open AI development in the future, with plans to train a 1-trillion-parameter model.