2026 is indeed proving to be an inflection point. the pace of progress across the field continues to validate our conviction that AI will fundamentally reshape how medicines are discovered. at the same time, the progress inside @metanova_labs reinforces our belief that decentralized, incentive-driven networks have a meaningful role to play in that future. this half marked a few important milestones for us, most importantly, moving beyond computational discovery. couldn't be more excited for the months ahead!

We're hosting a global virtual hackathon everyday! NOVA is the world's largest continuous AI competition for drug discovery. Current rewards: - $4k/day for Small Molecule Screening - $6k/day for Nanobody Design - $37K (+$4k/day) for Chemical Search Algorithms Calling all ML engineers, computational biologists and chemists, drug hunters and optimization enthusiasts to participate. Join our Discord and chat with our agent @Novalyst to get started. #SN68#

The new is now live. Take a deeper look at: • Our approach to AI drug discovery • NOVA's competition architecture • How value is created across the platform • Partnership opportunities Thank you to @14islands for bringing the redesign to life.

Incentive Alignment Update: Miner burn 0% Our goal is to leverage #Bittensor# to drive innovation. As subnet owners, we also have a responsibility to manage token health. This is why we—along with several other leading subnets—have historically burned a portion of miner emissions so rewards remain proportional to the work being contributed to the network. In light of the recent changes, we’ve decided to reduce our burn rate to 0%, as doing so will effectively benefit all token holders under the new incentive structure. Bittensor is a highly dynamic ecosystem, and we will continue to monitor changes closely and adapt our approach as the network evolves.

Geopolitical conservatism in biotech risks becoming anti-progress. Biosecurity matters but scientific talent is globally distributed and the tools for discovery should be too. @metanova_labs mission is more important than ever. Decentralized, permissionless infrastructure isn't just an ideological position — it's a practical response to a growing problem that ultimately affects all of us. Immigration to the global centers where institutions, capital, and infrastructure are concentrated is harder than ever. At the same time, access to frontier AI is increasingly determined by jurisdiction. As evidenced by @AnthropicAI recent restrictions on Fable and others, the tools that enable scientific discovery are becoming concentrated within a relatively small number of (or single) countries. This has implications for who can contribute to scientific innovation and from where. Roughly 2/3 of Nobel science laureates were not born in the United States, and approximately 40% of U.S. Nobel science prizes awarded since 2000 went to immigrants. Meanwhile, proposals such as a $100k H-1B fee, travel restrictions affecting dozens of countries, and compute export controls under the BIS AI Diffusion Framework are making participation in frontier research increasingly unequal. If similar restrictions had existed throughout the last century, many of the discoveries, companies, and medicines we rely on today may never have emerged. #Bittensor# offers a market-driven alternative for coordinating talent, capital, compute, and scientific innovation across borders.

NOVA Blueprint Update: The Triple Crown We’re improving the blueprint’s winner selection mechanism to better reward strong, generalizable performance. Previously, a challenger could replace the current king by clearing the winning threshold in a single epoch. Under the new **Triple Crown** system, a challenger must clear the threshold across **three consecutive epochs**, each with a **different target**. The update is intended to: * Reward improvements that are robust and repeatable * Encourage stronger generalization across targets * Increase confidence that a new winner represents a meaningful step forward * Make successful takeovers more representative of sustained performance To take the crown, a challenger must now earn it three times against the previous best. You can review the implementation here:

From openly blocking models for relevant pharma problems, to silently reducing Fable capabilities for frontier AI research, to now fully blocking the use of Fable, the signal is clear. There has never been a more relevant and exciting time to be building in the open, right at the critical intersection of AI and drug development. This is where incentivised open science will lead. #Bittensor#

Decentralized AI isn't just philosophically better, it's functionally necessary for science to move at the speed required. Anthropic already made Claude structurally useless for serious biotech work before any government pressure. When they launched Claude Opus 4, they activated ASL-3 — their internal Responsible Scaling Policy's highest deployed tier. The trigger? Internal testing showed the model could assist someone with a basic STEM background in synthesizing dangerous pathogens. Their chief scientist called it explicitly: COVID-like agents, pandemic-level risk. Their response was to apply broad biological research restrictions across the board. The problem is that the same guardrails that block novice bioterrorists also block legitimate computational drug discovery, protein engineering, nanobody design, and molecular pathway analysis. You can't surgically remove "dangerous biology" from "useful biology" at the model level — the underlying science is the same. So they blunted the whole thing. This is what centralized AI control looks like in practice. One company's risk tolerance — shaped by liability, regulatory pressure, and investor optics — becomes the ceiling for what an entire scientific field can access. Open source isn't just an ideological position — it's infrastructure for the next era of drug discovery.

NOVA Conviction Update + Incentive Alignment We didn't choose drug discovery because it was an easy or fast problem to solve. We chose it because it's one of the hardest and most meaningful problems AI can tackle. Our ambition and track record reflects our commitment to long-term value creation. Since launching, NOVA has shipped 3 incentive mechanisms, established 3 relevant partnerships with other biotech companies outside of the Bittensor ecosystem, provided open-source access to optimized and fine-tuned SOTA models, run ongoing screening campaigns across multiple therapeutic modalities, and much more. That work has been funded by token sales and it will continue on multi-year timelines regardless of short-term price action. As the conviction mechanism rolls out across Bittensor, we want to be transparent about how we're approaching it by locking company tokens and aligning founder incentives with subnet growth. Company Wallet — 50% Locked Even before conviction, we've always balanced self-financing with token health. We locked 50% of our company tokens formalizing that commitment (and we’re one of the top subnets in % and TAO equivalent). From here, the owner's cut will be automatically locked so our conviction will only grow over time. The liquid 50% funds operations through token sales and OTC, and gives us flexibility to navigate price volatility. We will continue to minimize price impact and optimize for token health. Founder Incentive Alignment We're allocating 20% of what we earn split across the four founders as a direct incentive. Each founder has real skin in the game, individually motivated to grow NOVA. Based on the current wallet distribution, each founder's individual position will remain below the top 10 holders after tax. This distribution naturally decentralizes stake across the team. Our upside is tied directly to yours. Built for the Long Term We came to Bittensor to build infrastructure that accelerates drug discovery. The problems we're solving have the potential to reshape how medicine is made with multi-year timelines and billions in implications. Long term thinking is baked into everything we do. Long-term thinking is baked into everything we do. We remain focused on: • building valuable discovery systems • advancing therapeutic development • expanding partnerships • improving incentive mechanisms • and creating lasting value for the network Thank you to everyone helping us build. This is only the beginning.

The panel “From Subnet to Market: Turning Bittensor Infrastructure into Real Businesses” delivered a deep and insightful discussion on building sustainable companies on top of Bittensor. Featuring leading voices from the Bittensor ecosystem: ▫️@micaelabazo – Co-Founder & CEO, Metanova Labs ▫️@0xcarro – CEO & Founder, Manifold Labs ▫️@mogmachine – Co-Founder & CEO, Taostats ▫️@gavinzaentz – Co-Founder, Leadpoet ▫️Moderated by @markjeffrey – Partner & CIO, Stillcore Capital The conversation explored the critical challenges and opportunities in turning Bittensor subnets into real-world businesses, with valuable perspectives from builders actively shipping in the ecosystem. Video highlights from the session▶️

The chemical universe is too massive for brute-force computing. "It would take over 170 years to brute force this data set by running inference on every single possible molecule." @metanova_labs #SN68# "Nova blueprint" incentivizes global miners to design and open-source their algorithmic shortcuts // The result is a 65x increase in molecular search speed compared to standard Thompson sampling methods. Full Novelty Search E072 ::

We have found crypto to be incredibly effective at incentivizing quantity AND quality with the right incentive design. For example in only 2 weeks running our nanobody design competition we saw: • Binding confidence: up ~3x from first to last submission • Structural fit: uncertainty at the interface dropped by nearly half • Hydrogen bonds: grow steadily across all designs. As well as in our chemical search algorithm competition, where a miner introduced an optimization strategy never applied to drug discovery before (not just quality but novelty). This strategy has continued to be improved across challenges and consistently outperforms a published benchmark across different targets. You can see our progress live on our dashboard:

newfound hope for a diagnosis that was once synonymous with a statistical death sentence. the value of these results is immeasurable. health is the highest-leverage investment of our time, attention, technology, and capital. @metanova_labs we are building a new decentralized approach to drug discovery with the goal of making that investment more efficient, open, and capable of coordinating different forms of intelligence toward therapeutic progress.

Subnet 68 NOVA :: Software prompting hardware @metanova_labs partnering with @onepot_ai to synthesise the compounds discovered by #SN68# miners "We have the competitions. We have the filtering of the compounds. They have an army of robots operating over their own chemical universe, and we can have the agents talking to each other to accelerate all of that." Full Novelty Search E072 ::