The Bittensor token price collapsed 17% in less than 6 hours after a major subnet developer publicly severed ties with the ecosystem, turning the price outlook negative. The governance bombshell behind this selloff raises a tougher question than most traders are currently asking.
On Thursday, the Covenant AI team, responsible for the Covenant-72B model considered the largest decentralized large language model (LLM) pre-training operation in history, announced its withdrawal from Bittensor.
LATEST: BITTENSOR FALLS 16% AS COVENANT AI LEAVES NETWORK DUE TO CENTRALIZATION ISSUES
Alliance AI (@covenant_ai) left Bittensor citing concerns about centralized control.
The team said that governance is not truly decentralized in practice. He claimed that key decisions remained… pic.twitter.com/QlA4AoMWbG– BSCN (@BSCNews) April 10, 2026
“The promise that attracted developers, miners, validators and investors to this ecosystem is a lie,” founder Sam Dear said, accusing co-founder Jacob Steves of imposing central control over the Covenant subnet after it grew too big to ignore.
Steves has not yet issued a public response. These statements severely shocked the markets. TAO is up 140% in six weeks, with 105% of those gains coming since March 8 alone, largely due to the success of Covenant-72B and Grayscale’s request to create a trust fund for TAO. However, this edifice of credibility today suffers from a serious crack.
Bittensor Price Prediction: Can TAO Recover?
At current levels near $280, TAO is in truly dangerous technical territory. The $300 level was immediate support and is currently trading below it, meaning this level is effectively lost.
On-chain data confirms the intensity of the move, with TAO’s 24-hour decline ranking among the sharpest declines in the large-cap AI token sector. The price rejection at the $360 resistance on April 9 was preceded by a negative MACD crossover, with sellers beginning to take their positions even before the news was released.
TAO’s social dominance reached a one-year high in early April, but retail trader sentiment shows just 1.5 positive comments for every negative comment, suggesting that conviction during the previous rally was weaker than price action suggests.
TAO must reclaim the $300 level within 48 hours based on a credible response from Steves or Bittensor’s governance structure to pave the way for a recovery towards $320-330. However, continued silence from executives and the removal of more subnets could accelerate selling pressure toward the $250 level or lower.
Comparison with similar sell-offs in other ecosystems triggered by large internal withdrawals suggests that recovery could take weeks, not days. Watch the $300 level; This is the dividing line.
Bitcoin Hyper attracts first investors as TAO attempts to recover
Governance risks have led to a complete reassessment of the decentralization premium for BAT, and this is the threat that traders have been warning about for a long time. When the most successful developer on the network describes its intrinsic value as a lie, moving capital does not wait for confirmation, but immediately begins moving.
One destination that arouses this interest is the Project Bitcoin Hyper ($HYPER)a layer 2 Bitcoin project that positions itself as the first BTC chain to integrate the Solana Virtual Machine (SVM).
The idea of the project is based on an architecture that combines the security and liquidity of Bitcoin and the speed of execution of smart contracts comparable to that of Solana, bypassing the initial limitations of Bitcoin: slow transactions, high fees and lack of programmability. And without the presence of a dominant governance triumvirate or political conflicts between sub-networks.
The pre-sale of the project has been collected $32 million At the current price of $0.0136with a staking option available for early participants. The project’s decentralized canonical bridge handles Bitcoin transfers authentically.
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