◈ Webinar ◈
How Distro Media Works: A Walkthrough With DeAI News & PermaPress Live webinar. Tue, Nov 17, 10:30 a.m. PT.
Save your seat.
The Opentensor Foundation, the nonprofit behind most of Bittensor's development, on Tuesday unveiled a payment system meant to let people and AI agents buy services across the crypto-powered AI marketplace with a single wallet.
Today, using one of Bittensor's specialized "subnets" for AI inference, computing power or storage usually means opening an account, prepaying and getting an API key, then repeating that for each additional subnet, the foundation said in a thread posted on X.
The new "Gamma" credits, each worth $1, are meant to replace that. They can be spent only on the subnet they were bought for and can't be transferred or cashed out. Users can set daily spending caps for each app or agent.
Buying credits permanently destroys some of the subnet's own token, so usage benefits the token's holders, according to the technical proposal. The dollar values rely on a price feed from an account picked by the network's administrators, and the feature must be switched on network-wide, with each subnet opting in.
That's a reminder that key levers remain centralized, as co-founder Jacob Steeves acknowledged in June, saying fuller decentralization could take about a year and a half, Crypto Briefing reported. The launch follows Bittensor's addition of quantum-resistant wallet protections, which DeAI News reported Nov. 6.
The DeAI angle: AI agents can't easily fill out sign-up forms. Gamma aims to let them pay for inference, compute and storage directly on-chain. The proposal's sample service listing also accepts x402, an agent payments standard that is open-source and managed by the non-profit Linux Foundation.
HOW AI WAS USED IN THE PRODUCTION OF THIS PIECE: I created the first draft of this story using Claude and custom skills. I then used the Distro Publisher MCP connector to file the draft directly to DeAI News on DistroVerse, the web app. I used the built-in DistroVerse story-editing interface to do the final edit and fact-check prior to publication.