iota
#9TrainingCooperative decentralized pre-training using data-parallel and model-parallel training across heterogeneous nodes.
Price
24h
7d Change
Market Cap
Emission
Miners
Validators
Competitor Mapping
iota
Decentralized
Market Cap
$42.65M
TAM
$30.00B
Model
Token-incentivized
Team
Decentralized miners
Google TPU Cloud + NVIDIA DGX
GOOGL
Market Cap
$3.50T
TAM
$30.00B
Model
Revenue-driven
Team
Enterprise
Transforms isolated GPU contributors into a cooperating training cluster, competing with Google TPU pods and NVIDIA DGX. First cooperative decentralized training protocol.
Implied Valuation
If iota captures a share of Google TPU Cloud + NVIDIA DGX's $30.00B TAM
Bear - 0.1% TAM
$30.00M
implied valuation
vs $42.65M current
Base - 1% TAM
$300.00M
implied valuation
vs $42.65M current
Bull - 5% TAM
$1.50B
implied valuation
vs $42.65M current
Scenarios illustrate potential scale relative to the traditional market. Actual outcomes depend on adoption, tokenomics, and competitive dynamics.
Thesis
Solves the key limitation of earlier pretraining subnets - miners cooperate instead of competing. Published on ArXiv with formal proofs. Operated by Macrocosmos, the largest subnet operator.
Team
Built by Macrocosmos (24-person team). Co-founded by Will Squires (CEO, MEng Civil Engineering, University of Warwick) and Steffen Cruz (CTO, PhD in Experimental Nuclear Physics, University of British Columbia, former CTO of Opentensor Foundation). Brian McCrindle is also a co-founder. Founded 2024. Team is doxxed.
- Will Squires - Co-founder & CEO - MEng Civil Engineering, University of Warwick
- Steffen Cruz - Co-founder & CTO - PhD Experimental Nuclear Physics, former CTO of Opentensor Foundation
- Brian McCrindle - Co-founder - Background in proteins and pre-training
Funding
No specific VC round disclosed. DSV mentioned as institutional investor partner. Funded through TAO emissions from multiple subnets (SN1, SN9, SN13, SN25).
Traction
Pre-trained models from 700M to 14B parameters beating established baselines. Macrocosmos operates 4+ subnets (SN1, SN9, SN13, SN25). 24-person team - one of the largest dedicated Bittensor development teams. 3.2B+ rows of Reddit/X data open-sourced on HuggingFace (via SN13). Accepted to NeurIPS.
Recent News
- Mar 2026 - Macrocosmos highlighted as 'most underrated team in TAO ecosystem' for accelerating decentralized training
- 2026 - IOTA and Templar SN3 attacking same problem (decentralized training) from different angles
- 2025 - SN9 work accepted at NeurIPS
- 2026 - SDK launch and subnet dashboards completed
Risk
Cooperative training over commodity internet introduces latency and bandwidth constraints limiting practical model scale.