Retail investors have limited access to the biggest artificial intelligence companies, such as OpenAI and Anthropic, which remain private and attract interest mainly from large venture funds and tech giants like Microsoft and Google. Earlier this year, Robinhood announced an offering that aimed to give retail users exposure to OpenAI growth through tokenized shares, using a special purpose vehicle to back the tokens.

According to OpenAI legal counsel, these tokens do not represent real equity in the company and are not authorized by OpenAI. This could mean that investors in these tokens may face elevated risks, including legal risks and questions about the tokens’ actual value.

Access to early-stage growth in AI startups has generally been reserved for institutional investors. Retail investors must either invest in public large technology stocks such as NVIDIA or look to new investment products that attempt to mimic private market exposure. Bittensor has presented an alternative model with its Dynamic TAO upgrade launched in February 2024. This method lets holders of TAO tokens allocate directly to individual AI subnets—each acting as an on-chain AI startup—and receive alpha tokens based on project performance and demand.

“The subnets form an ecosystem within an ecosystem, where performance and utility are rewarded, stacking opportunities both through staking returns and alpha token appreciation,” said ‘Zerobit’, CEO of Talisman, a wallet platform in Bittensor’s network, at Taiwan Blockchain Week.

One key subnet, Bridges (SN62), functions as a decentralized code generation agent and has outperformed Claude 4 by Anthropic in code tasks. Decentralized miners competing for network rewards drove Bridges’ accuracy above 80%, surpassing results from centralized AI efforts at significantly lower cost. Another subnet, Chutes (SN64), operates as a decentralized infrastructure provider for AI compute, delivering processing at costs up to 85% lower than traditional providers, and hosts DeepSeek’s large language models for public use.

Compared to special purpose vehicles (SPVs) that offer synthetic exposure to private companies with possible legal and liquidity risks, subnet staking on Bittensor is open to any participant and allows performance to be tracked on-chain. “Where most crypto projects lock growth behind insider deals, Bittensor’s dTAO opens investment access from day one, letting them ride the growth in the value of the alpha token,” said Brad Fuller of Bittensor.ai.

In financial markets, Bitcoin remained steady at $116,851 after the Federal Reserve’s quarter-point interest rate cut. Ethereum increased 6% for the week to $4,603.60. Deutsche Bank raised its 2026 gold price forecast to $4,000 per ounce, citing strong central bank demand and global economic uncertainty.

Other cryptocurrency market developments include a Switzerland-based issuer avoiding whitelisting regulations for tokenized Tesla shares (Decrypt), executive departures at Kraken (CoinDesk), and a $15 million acquisition in Solana by a large investor (DeFi-development-acquires-nearly-15-million-in-sol-pushing-solana-holdings-above-2-million-tokens?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss”>The Block).

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