Who founded Bittensor?
The useful founder story is not a legend about one person. Bittensor grew out of a technical question: could machine intelligence be organized as an open market, with decentralized incentives replacing a single corporate owner?
Bittensor's origin story centers on Jacob Robert Steeves, known in the ecosystem as Const, and Ala Shaabana, known as ShibShib. The technical origin story is broader: arXiv lists the withdrawn BitTensor peer-to-peer intelligence market paper under Yuma Rao, Jacob Steeves, Ala Shaabana, Daniel Attevelt, and Matthew McAteer.
- Jacob Steeves and Ala Shaabana are Bittensor co-founders
- The early arXiv paper is useful context, but it is marked withdrawn
- The project is now larger than any single founder story, with many subnet teams and contributors
The founding idea
The early Bittensor thesis was that intelligence could be produced and priced by a peer-to-peer market. Instead of rewarding only raw compute, the network would reward participants that provide useful informational value, with validators and consensus turning quality judgments into incentives.
The people behind the early network
Jacob Steeves and Ala Shaabana led Bittensor's founding and early Opentensor work. Their backgrounds span machine learning, distributed systems, academic AI research, and open-source crypto infrastructure.
Why the ecosystem matters now
Today, Bittensor is not only a founder narrative. Subnet owners, validators, miners, researchers, wallet teams, analytics platforms, and trading tools all shape the network. The founder story is useful context; the live subnet economy is where practical research starts.
Bittensor timeline
2019: Bittensor founding work begins
Jacob Steeves and Ala Shaabana are tied to Bittensor's founding period and the early Opentensor work that later became the public network.
March 2020: The peer-to-peer intelligence market paper appears
The early BitTensor paper was submitted to arXiv, framing the idea of a market where machine intelligence could be produced, ranked, and rewarded by a decentralized network.
January 2021: Kusanagi launches as the first public network iteration
Opentensor describes Kusanagi as the first iteration of the main Bittensor network. This is the practical public-launch milestone, when miners and validators could begin participating for TAO rewards.
November 2021 - March 2023: Nakamoto and Finney refine the chain
Kusanagi was followed by the Nakamoto upgrade in November 2021, then the current Finney chain on March 20, 2023. These upgrades moved the network toward the infrastructure used by today's subnet economy.
October 2, 2023: User-created subnets go live
The subnet launch opened Bittensor beyond its original market structure. After this point, independent subnet teams could create specialized incentive markets for compute, data, inference, prediction, and other digital work.
February 13, 2025: Dynamic TAO brings subnet-level markets
Dynamic TAO, or dTAO, introduced subnet alpha tokens and AMM-style subnet pools. That made individual subnets directly investible and changed how users think about staking, emissions, and alpha exposure.
Founder profiles
Jacob Robert Steeves (Const)
Co-founder of Bittensor
Jacob Robert Steeves, known in the ecosystem as Const, co-founded Bittensor after studying mathematics and computer science at Simon Fraser University and working in machine learning and software engineering.
Before Bittensor, Steeves worked at Knowm and Google. He later became CEO of Affine, a Bittensor subnet focused on reinforcement learning research.
Ala Shaabana (ShibShib)
Co-founder of Bittensor
Ala Shaabana, known in the community as ShibShib, co-founded Bittensor after an academic path through computer science, including a University of Windsor degree and doctoral work at McMaster University.
Shaabana came to Bittensor from an academic and engineering background rather than a crypto-native one. His earlier work included shrinking AI models for small devices, followed by roles at VMware and Instacart. For Bittensor, the core idea was collaborative intelligence: AI models sharing knowledge, with blockchain incentives rewarding useful contribution.
Was Bittensor founded by one person?
No. Jacob Steeves and Ala Shaabana co-founded Bittensor, while Bittensor's early technical history also includes Yuma Rao and other contributors.
When was Bittensor founded?
Bittensor's founding work is commonly placed in 2019. The early peer-to-peer intelligence market paper appeared in March 2020, and the first public network iteration, Kusanagi, launched in January 2021.
When did Bittensor subnets and dTAO launch?
User-created Bittensor subnets went live on October 2, 2023. Dynamic TAO, or dTAO, launched on February 13, 2025 and introduced subnet alpha tokens with subnet-level market pools.
Why do people mention Yuma Rao?
Yuma Rao is one of the listed authors of the early BitTensor peer-to-peer intelligence market paper on arXiv. That is why the name appears in discussions about Bittensor's technical origin, even though Jacob Steeves and Ala Shaabana are the co-founders most closely associated with building the network and Opentensor.
Key pages:
learn about Bittensor,
Bittensor glossary,
Bittensor FAQ,
Bittensor subnet screener,
portfolio tracker,
subnet baskets,
Neuralteq validator,
and fees.