Bittensor (TAO) gained more than 35% in a single week and nearly doubled since early March — but social media sentiment data suggests the retail crowd remains skeptical of the AI-focused token's rally, which analysts consider to be a potential bullish signal.
TAO Rally and Nvidia Catalyst
The surge began around Mar. 20, when Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang praised decentralized AI training models during the company's GTC 2026 keynote. Huang raised his AI hardware revenue forecast to $1 trillion through 2027. On the All-In Podcast, Chamath Palihapitiya brought up Bittensor's recent technical achievement, and Huang compared it favorably to Folding@home.
That achievement was Covenant-72B, a 72-billion-parameter language model pre-trained entirely on decentralized commodity hardware by more than 70 contributors worldwide. An arXiv paper confirmed it as the largest decentralized large language model pre-training run on record, scoring 67.1 on the MMLU benchmark.
TAO climbed from roughly $143 on Feb. 11 to a peak above $370 this week, representing a gain of more than 117% in five weeks.
The token has since pulled back to the $340 level but still holds a market cap of about $3.65 billion, ranking 27th ahead of Shiba Inu (SHIB) and Toncoin (TON).
A viral moment arrived on Mar. 24, when Jason Calacanis — co-host of the All-In Podcast with 1.1 million followers on X — posted "$tao > $btc." The post carried extra weight because Calacanis gave Bitcoin (BTC) a 60 to 70 percent chance of going to zero back in 2018.
Also Read: Can Bitcoin Hold $70K Or Will Bears Take Over?
Santiment Social Data
Despite the sharp price move, social media discussions tell a more cautious story. Santiment noted in an X post that social volume on platforms like Reddit, X, and Telegram hit its second-highest level in six months. Yet sentiment remains surprisingly balanced.
Bittensor's Positive/Negative Sentiment metric sits at 1.5 — three bullish comments for every two bearish ones. That negative bias is actually the third strongest reading in six months.
FOMO has not taken hold among retail traders.
"This is generally a good sign that the rally can continue, with little interference from greedy traders that typically signal forming tops," Santiment noted.
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