Author: 0xSammy

Compilation: Deep Tide TechFlow

Deep Tide Guide: The Bittensor subnet Templar has completed the largest decentralized LLM pre-training in history—Covenant-72B with 72 billion parameters, performance reportedly comparable to LLaMA-2-70B, and the entire training was carried out using consumer-grade internet hardware.

This is not a proof of concept, but a delivered product that upgrades Bittensor's narrative from "subnets can exist" to "subnets can produce outputs that compete with centralized alternatives."

Meanwhile, AWS released the complete technical reference architecture for x402, which, combined with these developments, pushed the DeAI sector up 12% in a single week.

The full text is as follows:

This Issue's Headline: TAO and Covenant-72B

On March 10, Templar (Bittensor's number 3 subnet) completed the largest decentralized LLM pre-training in history: Covenant-72B. 72 billion parameters. Approximately 1.1 trillion tokens. Completely trained on consumer-grade internet hardware on the Bittensor permissionless network. Anyone with a GPU can freely join or leave. Performance reportedly competes with LLaMA-2-70B.

This upgrades Bittensor's core argument from "subnets can exist" to "subnets can produce outputs that compete with centralized alternatives."

A permissionless network of consumer-grade GPUs collaborates on a scale previously only associated with mega-scale cloud service providers. Before Covenant-72B, decentralized training was merely a roadmap commitment; now, it is a delivered product.

Within 24 hours of the announcement, TAO rose by 19%, increasing by +39.8% over the week, and Templar’s post on X received 1.7 million views:

Three ecological subnets (SN3 Templar, SN4 Targon, SN39 Basilica) made it to the top eight daily gainers on CoinGecko. The structural dynamics between TAO and the subnets amplified the buying pressure: investors need TAO to acquire subnet tokens, so concentrated demand from a single subnet cascades to the accumulation of the underlying asset.

The price now anchors on a verifiable technical milestone. Covenant-72B is a trained model. Grayscale's Bittensor trust SEC application (due December 2025) is pending approval; xTAO continues to accumulate as the largest corporate holder. Institutional access infrastructure is being simultaneously constructed.

A) DeAI Total Market Cap Analysis

This week, the total market cap of DeAI increased by $1.9 billion (+12%), reaching $16.2 billion:

This week’s core news is Templar's Covenant-72B (see above). The AI sector as a whole benefits from Bittensor's catalytic effect and the ongoing institutional narrative momentum surrounding the Agent infrastructure.

TAO (7 days +40%): $277.51, market cap $2.66 billion. The catalyst is Covenant-72B; the structural dynamics from the subnets to TAO amplified the gains.

FET (7 days +61%): $0.2365, market cap $534 million. The strongest weekly gain among leading DeAI assets. The Artificial Superintelligence Alliance benefits from the capital rotation triggered by the TAO catalyst, with capital generally flowing into AI tokens.

RENDER (7 days +31%): $1.88, market cap $976 million. Covenant-72B proves that distributed GPU networks can train competitive models, providing a tailwind for the decentralized computing narrative.

NEAR (7 days +16%): $1.47, market cap $1.89 billion. IronClaw (a secure, fortified version of OpenClaw rewritten in Rust, deployed in TEE) and NEARCON 2026 catalysts continue to play a role. NEAR’s positioning as enterprise-grade OpenClaw infrastructure helps it remain in AI buying activity.

ICP (7 days +9%): $2.71, market cap $1.49 billion. DFINITY's ICP platform's self-writing application platform Caffeine AI continues to attract developers (according to Dominic Williams, the number of monthly unique visitors is in the hundreds of thousands). Version 3 is set to launch, featuring Claude Code integration. The "Mission 70" token economics proposal aims to reduce annual inflation by 70% by the end of 2026, with Caffeine-driven computing destruction as the key mechanism. In the past 30 days, ICP ranked first in coding development activity for AI/big data crypto projects.

VIRTUAL (7 days -16%): $0.7952, market cap $523 million. After the AGDP-driven rally, it has pulled back. But this week, the more interesting story for VIRTUAL lies in the x402 facilitator data: Virtuals have entered the top three facilitators by transaction amount with ACP.

B) Robotics Total Market Cap Analysis

This week, the total market cap of the robotics sector increased by $44 million (+6%), reaching $811 million:

PEAQ (7 days +48%): $0.02005, market cap $3.78 million. The standout performer. Peaq released a new video outlining the robotics narrative and its Robotics SDK (compatible with ROS 2, allowing any robot to obtain a peaq ID, complete on-chain payments, and data verification). Hashkey Capital's report on the "Machine Economy" lists peaq as a foundational layer for machine identity, payment, and governance. Over 60 DePIN projects across 22 industries are currently operating on the network; the Dubai VARA regulatory sandbox has opened for on-chain robotic businesses.

ROBO (7 days -28%): $0.03336, market cap $7.49 million. Fabric Protocol (OpenMind/Fabric Foundation) is searching for a price equilibrium after initial listing enthusiasm. Still a relatively new participant in the robotics category.

GEOD (7 days -14%): $0.1371, market cap $5.81 million. 24-hour trading volume was only $206,000, despite GEO-SWARM launching on Kickstarter, and Lightspeed's institutional platform under Solana/Blockworks has added GEOD coverage, which is expected to improve institutional visibility over time.

Crypto AI Agent Sector

a) Nansen DEX Fund Flow (All Traders, 7 Days)

sUSDAI (+$1.83 million net inflow): The largest net inflow in the AI sector. The yield layer for USDai, which is a GPU-collateralized stablecoin protocol (Permian Labs; backed by Dragonfly, Coinbase Ventures, YZi Labs). It lends against physical GPU infrastructure and returns yields through sUSDAI. PayPal/PYUSD integration; peak TVL $658 million. The CHIP governance token was issued via CoinList at the end of February; capital is rotating toward the yield layer. DeFi capital meets financing for physical AI infrastructure.

WTAO (+$1 million net inflow): Purchases of $11 million vs. sales of $10 million. Confirms that Covenant-72B drove real DEX accumulation behavior.

VIRTUAL (+$810,000 net inflow): Despite a 16.3% decline in price this week, the net inflow remains positive. Purchases of $40.19 million vs. sales of $39.38 million. Smart money is buying during the downturn. This group's liquidity is the deepest, reaching $29.18 million.

RENDER (+$483,000 net inflow): Slightly positive. The sector is favorable, with no specific catalysts. Render Con 2026 is upcoming.

LINK (+$458,000 net inflow): Chainlink appeared in the AI sector filter worth noting. The Chainlink Runtime Engine is the connective organization of the Agent infrastructure; this week's AWS blog post explicitly cited the CRE integration.

b) Nansen Public Figures Fund Flow (7 Days)

DRV (+$264,000 net inflow, 7 traders): Derive, a decentralized derivatives protocol based on OP Stack. 7 days +48.84%, market cap $111 million. Institutional staking will go live on March 23; 25% of transaction fees are used for DRV buybacks.

FAI (+$187,000 net inflow, 4 traders): Freysa AI, a sovereign Agent stack on Base. Market cap $62 million. Adopts TEE and zkTLS, enabling the Agent to hold its own keys. Similar to OpenClaw, but approaches from a cryptographic sovereignty angle.

WTAO (+$105,000 net inflow, 3 traders): Confirms the signals around Covenant-72B among all traders.

c) x402 Analysis

i) Decrease in Transaction Numbers, Increase in Transaction Amounts

Artemis data presents two stories:

Transaction numbers (left chart): Significantly decreased from the peak in December/January. The average daily number of transactions has fallen from previously over 1.5 million to 2 million, down to the level of hundreds of thousands.

Transaction amounts (right chart): After a steady period in January/February, there was a sharp increase, pushing the average daily transaction amount to $3 million to $4 million. Concentrated on infrastructure and utility-type services, and data-as-a-service, with inter-Agent services contributing less.

This divergence is the most important signal for the current x402. A decrease in transaction numbers with an increase in transaction amounts indicates that the average transaction size is increasing. False transactions are being cleaned out; what remains are fewer but higher-value real commercial transactions.

Based on the current merchant landscape, the dominant categories likely represent: Agent payment computing (cloud GPU, inference nodes, Chutes); API data source access (Firecrawl, StableEnrich, market intelligence data); browser sessions (Browserbase); and content generation (Freepik).

Inter-Agent services are structurally the most worth noting: Autonomous Agents paying other Agents to complete sub-tasks.

AI-generated content and token issuance previously dominated early transaction numbers, but are now being cleaned out.

ii) a16z and the Data Measurement Gap

a16z partner Noah Levine noted that "real" transaction volumes are far below the inflated figures caused by false volume brushing earlier this year. Bloomberg reported that x402's 30-day payment total is $24 million (data from x402.org); Allium Labs' data is about $3 million; after filtering out brush volume, Artemis estimates real transaction volume at about $1.6 million.

But this gap reveals how early the measurement infrastructure is—especially when more mature institutions begin to adopt this open protocol: Stripe, Cloudflare, Vercel, and Google have all integrated x402.

These institutions are betting not just on a monthly $1.6 million, but on how much that figure will grow when Agents become the default buyers.

iii) Facilitator Rankings (Past 7 Days)

The facilitator rankings are diversifying: high-frequency micro-settlements (Dexter), institutional API access (Coinbase), structured Agent business (Virtuals/ACP).

The Virtuals Protocol (144,140 requests, $419,670 transaction volume): Ranked third by request volume, but has the highest transaction volume. The average price per request is about $2.72 (five times that of Coinbase, 54 times that of Dexter). 3,690 buyers correspond to only 2 sellers.

This reflects ACP in settling structured Agent-to-Agent commercial transactions: a few service-oriented Agents complete high-value tasks for thousands of buyers.

On March 10, Virtuals and the Ethereum Foundation dAI team jointly submitted ERC-8183, formally standardizing the lifecycle of trusted Agent commercial transactions alongside x402 (payments) and ERC-8004 (identity/reputation).

iv) AWS Releases Complete x402 Reference Architecture

On March 15, AWS published "x402 and Agent Business: Redefining Autonomous Payments in Financial Services" on its industry blog, along with a complete technical reference architecture.

When AWS released a production-grade reference architecture containing open-source code for the native crypto payment standard, the protocol transitioned from the concept stage to the infrastructure stage.

For more information on the development trajectory of x402, please follow Khala Research; we will publish a complete report later this week. Below is the current ecosystem map:

Disclaimer: The content covered in this communication should not be construed as investment or financial advice. It is for informational and educational purposes only.

Disclosure: I hold some of these assets and have partnerships with some of the projects mentioned in this communication.