THIS WEEK IN 30 SECONDS

• Across Protocol proposes DAO-to-C-corp conversion. ACX moved 85% in 24 hours, which tells you how much the market has been waiting for someone to just do this. The vote is on April 2; I think it’s the most important governance event in crypto this quarter.

• x402 makes stablecoins the settlement layer for AI agents. Coinbase and Cloudflare built a protocol that lets AI agents pay for things autonomously and it’s already past 35 million transactions with Stripe and Google adopting it. My read is that this is the first real mechanism that creates organic stablecoin demand from outside the crypto ecosystem.

$ACX at $50mm proposes industry first token buy out and conversion to US equity

Last March 11, Risk Labs proposed The Bridge Across. The idea is to convert Across Protocol’s token-based DAO into a U.S. C-corporation (AcrossCo) and give holders a choice about what they want to do with their position.

ACX moved 85% the same day, daily volume hit $51.7M (that’s up 3,000%) and derivatives open interest jumped 950% to $20M. It’s interesting how the market understood immediately what this meant, even if most people couldn’t articulate why.

In my opinion, the two paths for holders are straightforward. First, you can convert your tokens 1:1 into equity. Large holders do this directly, while smaller holders go through an SPV with a minimum of around 250K ACX or roughly $10K.

Second, you can take a buyout: redeem ACX for USDC at $0.04375, which is a 25% premium to the 30-day average, with a six-month window to decide. US participants need to verify accredited investor status either way.

What I find most interesting about this is the reason it’s happening at all. The token and DAO structure was actively blocking the protocol from signing enterprise partnerships.

At some point, the team decided that the ideological cost of restructuring was lower than the commercial cost of staying the same. The protocol itself stays open and permissionless, only the business layer is changing.

Our prediction: 3-5 enterprise-facing protocols announce token-to-equity conversions by Q3 2026, conditional on Across’s equity exchange closing by Q2 without SEC or state-level regulatory delays.

What we’re watching: April 2 vote outcome. SEC/FinCEN commentary on token-to-equity frameworks. Watch for bridge and L1 protocol announcements within 6 months.

x402: STABLECOINS AS THE SETTLEMENT LAYER FOR AI AGENTS

My team at Khala Research published a deep-dive infographic on x402. It’s worth understanding what this protocol actually does before the broader market catches up to it.

Coinbase and Cloudflare built x402 by reviving HTTP's 402 "Payment Required" status code, which we know is something that's been sitting unused in the internet's architecture since the 1990s. What it does now is let AI agents pay for API access, compute, and data autonomously without a human authorizing the transaction.

It launched in September 2025, and has already processed 35 million transactions and $10 million in volume on Solana. Stripe supports it on Base, Google's Agent Payments Protocol incorporates it, and Cloudflare and Vercel support it natively.

x402 is the first mechanism I’ve seen that creates autonomous demand for stablecoins from outside the crypto ecosystem entirely. AI agents paying for real services don’t care about crypto ideology; they just need a settlement layer that works.

What we’re watching: Monthly USDC settlement volume via x402. Target: $500M/month by Q4 2026 to confirm structural demand shift.

GEODNET: $53M MARKET CAP, $7.3M ARR, 7x REVENUE

GEODNET trades at 7x revenue with a $53M market cap and $7.3M in ARR, and my read is that it’s the cheapest liquid way to get exposure to centimeter-level positioning infrastructure for robotics right now.

The barrier to entry is node density. GEODNET has 20,000+ stations across 153 countries, and that’s genuinely hard to replicate because you can’t just raise money and build it overnight. You’d need the global hardware footprint already in place.

The cost advantage is what caught my attention when we hosted Multicoin on Supercycle.

A GEODNET consumer station costs $700, while an enterprise RTK unit costs a whopping $12,000. That’s the same positioning accuracy at a fraction of the price and ARR grew from $5M in Q4 2025 to $7.3M in March 2026 which tells you the end markets (like humanoid robots or autonomous vehicles) are already buying. Multicoin led with $8M of the $15M round and their thesis is simple: GEODNET is the positioning layer for the robotics era.

What we’re watching: Robotics adoption inflection (humanoid unit shipments exceeding production scale by Q4 2026) and ARR trajectory toward $15M.

TAO SUBNETS: 128 NETWORKS, $20M+ ARR, $2.3B COMBINED MCAP

Bittensor runs 128 active subnets generating $20M+ annualized revenue as of March 2026. The combined subnet token market cap is $2.3B.

I wrote a summary covering the major players this week. The thesis from Fundstrat and Greyscale is that decentralized AI infrastructure competes on speed. Subnets launch in 4 to 8 weeks, compared to the 12 to 18 months it takes for VC-backed AI startups. That difference is starting to show up in the revenue numbers.

The 3 subnets I’m watching this week are METANOVA, Yanez, and Beam. What you’ll notice is all three are competing against billion-dollar incumbents at a fraction of the valuation.

Of the three, Yanez is the one I’d watch most closely in the near term. It's the standout subnet being only one with paying clients today, against NOVA’s 12 to 18 month validation cycle and Beam’s pre-revenue state.

Until next week,

Jack Leung

Supercycle Podcast · Pylon Partners

DIVE DEEPER

The Bridge Across — Across Protocol Forum

ACX Rockets 80% on DAO-to-Corp Plans — CoinDesk

Paradigm-Backed Across Explores Token-to-Equity — The Block

x402 Infographic — Khala Research

Launching the x402 Foundation — Cloudflare Blog

x402: Coinbase and the AI Agent Era — Tiger Research

Where Are All The Robots? — Multicoin Capital

GEODNET Episode — Supercycle Podcast x Multicoin

TAO Subnet Summary — Haitzu

Bittensor on the Eve of the First Halving — Grayscale Research

Bittensor: The Internet of AI — Fundstrat / Grayscale

Live Subnet Dashboard — Taostats

Public markets give you Google and Meta. And while they have real exposure, there’s no asymmetric upside. Private markets give you Anthropic and OpenAI, but only if you’re an LP in a top-tier Silicon Valley fund. The door is closed for everyone else.

This is the whitespace that Bittensor ($TAO) was built for. It’s the largest decentralized AI protocol by market cap. It’s open, permissionless, and free from the insider pre-mines that define its competitors.

However, a protocol alone doesn’t build an ecosystem.

Yuma, DCG’s dedicated operating arm inside Bittensor, is the institutional bet that the ecosystem is real. It’s a validator, subnet incubator, and institutional on-ramp rolled into one.

Our recent Supercycle with Yuma’s Chief Revenue Officer, Evan Malanga, unveiled what they’re building, and which bets are already paying off.

If you’re allocating to AI in 2026, read on to know where the asymmetric upside still lives.

Why Bittensor Doesn’t Need to Beat OpenAI to Win the AI Race

Malanga is direct about one thing: Bittensor can achieve entirely new AI categories without even stepping on OpenAI’s turf.

One of the strongest arguments is cost. Running AI training through centralized infrastructure, like AWS or Google Cloud, is extraordinarily expensive. On the other hand, Bittensor subnets are showing that distributed, incentivized compute can get you near the same results for a fraction of the price.

Subnets like Macrocosmos and Templar are doing distributed model training at a fraction of what a hyperscaler would pay. In fact, Macrocosmos recently launched training-at-home, allowing individuals to contribute compute to distributed training pipelines from their own devices.

We’ll be straightforward: the benchmarks of decentralized compute are yet to be state-of-the-art. But they are close — and cost way less.

Malanga further explains that, for investors coming from outside the ecosystem, he runs them through a decision tree.

That framing, he says, is when the light bulb goes on for most capital allocators.

What’s striking is that Bittensor’s organic legitimacy was already being established long before institutions arrived to validate it. When DCG first evaluated Bittensor seriously in early 2024, the protocol’s annual emissions were approximately 4x the total venture capital flowing into all other Web3 AI projects combined.

Malanga laments that that was the conviction signal.

Because how is Bittensor’s organic growth outpacing the entire venture-backed field before most investors had even heard of it?

What is Yuma?

YumaGroup — or Yuma, for short — is a subsidiary of Digital Currency Group (DCG), and the firm behind Grayscale, Foundry, and some of the most durable infrastructure plays in crypto.

It is purpose-built to do for Bittensor what DCG has done for every major crypto category it has touched: build the infrastructure that makes institutional participation possible.

It operates across three verticals.

The three verticals aren’t separate bets, but rather, a flywheel. Incubation builds the supply of quality subnets, Validation secures the network and earns emissions, while Asset Management brings institutional capital in to meet them.

The Yuma Subnets Already Generating Revenue

Not every Bittensor subnet makes it to a customer conversation.

The ones below have, and, in some cases, are already closing enterprise contracts.

SCORE (Subnet 44)

SCORE is Yuma’s most prominent portfolio company and Malanga‘s personal favorite. The team was among Yuma’s first incubations before the firm even had a formal name.

What started as computer vision for UK football clubs has expanded into manufacturing, fuel, and agriculture. The core product converts live video feeds into structured, queryable datasets.

The claim is it’s 10-100x cheaper (🚩: self-reported and unaudited, but directionally credible given the decentralized compute model). SCORE reports $3M annualized revenue from 7 enterprise clients, with an average contract value of $428K per client.

Three anchor enterprise clients were also signed in recent months, and SCORE reports a 100% trial conversion rate.

In February 2026, SCORE shipped MANIFEST, a mechanism upgrade that moves from static tasks to configurable production-grade specifications.

This is the shift from research subnet to production infrastructure. The team is also building a fantasy sports app for the 2026 World Cup, using their proprietary football data pipeline.

What to watch: Conversion of 60-day trials into multi-year contracts with guaranteed SLAs. $3M ARR from 7 clients is strong signal, but all revenue figures are self-reported and unaudited. The next proof point is independently verifiable contract data.

Yanez (Subnet 54)

Most Bittensor subnets are science experiments. Yanez is selling to compliance teams at banks.

Launched during Proof of Talk in Paris, summer 2025, Yanez takes a novel approach to financial fraud and compliance testing. Rather than static defence, it incentivizes miners to constantly generate new attack vectors — like synthetic identities or deepfake-resistant biometrics — so clients can anticipate breaches before they happen

The TAM is $200B+ in AML/sanctions screening globally. Legacy vendors like LexisNexis and ComplyAdvantage serve it with slow-moving, static software. An open, incentivised competition for discovering new vulnerabilities is structurally better than anything a centralised vendor can build.

The team has earned early credibility. Founders who previously built and sold companies to Visa and McAfee, a $900K oversubscribed seed round, and screening provider integrations covering 75%+ of the market.

What to watch: Enterprise pilot conversions. The TAM is enormous and the team is credible, but signed contracts with named compliance buyers are the next proof point.

Babelit (SN59)

Babelbit is a real-time translation subnet built on Bittensor, expanding rapidly from text-to-text into speech-to-speech.

The founder came out of the SCORE team, moving from launch to a speech-based challenge mechanism in under six months..

Babelit uses LLMs to predict and complete phrases before the speaker finishes, eliminating latency in real-time video call translation. Multiple parameters like latency and speaker identity are all are testable on-chain.

Both the Taostats founder and a Bittensor Protocol co-founder have both publicly backed the project.

Bitsec (SN 60)

Bitsec is a cybersecurity subnet where AI agents compete against each other to find and fix code exploits.

Malanga shares that the founder’s pitch to Yuma was unconventional. Rather than a deck, he ran an active Foundry-operated subnet through his testnet, and delivered a complete vulnerability report.

When Foundry’s technical team reviewed the findings, they made the fixes. The product had proven itself before a single conversation about investment.

After a slow start as a solo founder, Bitsec underwent a significant V2 rebuild in late 2025, drawing inspiration from Ridge’s agent competition model.

In one case, Bitsec identified the same exploit that caused the $250M Cetus hack in under 15 minutes.

What to watch: Commercial adoption beyond competitions. Bug bounties prove capability. Enterprise contracts prove a business.

Yuma As The Institutional On-Ramp to $TAO

The asset management business was born from an access problem.

After the Dynamic TAO (dTAO) protocol update launched, the subnet economy exploded from 64 to 128 subnets in weeks. But the infrastructure to invest in it did not keep pace; major custodians like BitGo and Copper did not yet support subnet tokens. Meanwhile, exchanges like Kraken and Coinbase had TAO listed, but offered zero subnet-level exposure.

Yuma piloted its own products internally throughout spring and summer 2025, eventually launching two simplified investment vehicles for accredited investors in October 2025.

Since inception, the Subnet Composite has outperformed TAO staked on root by 25% in TAO terms, doing exactly what Yuma designed it to do.

The infrastructure is already institutional-grade. Yuma has partnered with over a dozen custodians and platforms to enable TAO staking through qualified custody.

If a TAO ETF ever emerges, the rails are already in place.

We’ve Only Scratched The Surface

Yuma’s conviction is simple: Bittensor doesn’t need to beat the labs if they just keep building what they can’t.

If that thesis plays out, we’re still in the early innings, and Evan has a lot more to say about where it goes from here.

The full conversation is on the Supercycle Podcast for free.

Also listen on Spotify

Why this conversation matters

This episode brings together builders and investors who have actually shipped at the intersection of AI, crypto, and incentives.

Wei Xie was an early LP in Numerai and comes from a traditional quantitative finance background. He has seen firsthand how crowdsourced intelligence can be turned into durable, institutional-grade alpha and why most attempts fail.

Max Sebti is a subnet owner on Bittensor and the founder of Score, building vision AI infrastructure inside one of the most technically demanding AI ecosystems in crypto. He operates directly at the incentive layer where theory meets production.

Together, they break down how decentralized systems coordinate intelligence, why incentive design is the real bottleneck, and what it takes for AI-native crypto networks to matter beyond narratives.

This is a conversation about how edge is created, not how it’s marketed.

Hosts

Jack Leung
Founder of Supercycle. Focused on crypto markets, narratives, and emerging tech.

Daniel Andrade
Engineer and investor-operator focused on AI, robotics, and crypto market structure.

Guests

Wei Xie
NRN Agents Founder, Early LP
Deep background in quantitative finance and incentive design

Max Sebti
Founder of Score, Subnet Owner on Bittensor
Building vision AI infrastructure on decentralized rails

What we cover

• Why Bittensor is best understood as Bitcoin for AI

• How subnets turn intelligence into an incentive-aligned marketplace

• Why Numerai worked where most crowdsourced alpha fails

• Vision AI as the missing layer for robotics and real-world agents

• Why intelligence is deflating but data is compounding

• How decentralized incentive systems discover edge faster than institutions

• Why the real AI TAM is human labor (~$50T annually)

Key moments

0:00 – Why human work will soon cost cents
1:30 – What Bittensor actually is
5:00 – Incentives, subnets, and why they are hard to design
7:00 – “Bitcoin for AI” and the halving analogy
11:00 – How subnets make money and attract capital
18:00 – Vision AI in sports, markets, and real-world systems
21:30 – What Numerai really solved
26:30 – Why institutions trusted Numerai with massive capital
30:00 – Vision, robotics, and VLAs (Vision-Language-Action models)
32:00 – The $50T human labor opportunity
35:00 – Data, intelligence, and why decentralization matters

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Listen on:
Spotify · Apple Podcasts

Why this conversation matters

Our conversation with Shayon, breaks down how one of crypto’s biggest funds thinks about edge, market structure, and where the next cycle’s winners are.

Shayon is an Investment Partner at Multicoin Capital, a thesis-driven crypto investment firm. Multicoin reports roughly ~US$5.9B AUM. He’s also authored major Multicoin theses and led work on DePIN/physical AI, including Multicoin’s $8M strategic acquisition of GEOD (Geodnet).

Guest

Shayon Sengupta

• Investment Partner at Multicoin

• Writing

  • Jito (JTO) Asset Report - Multicoin Capital

  • Where Are All The Robots? - Multicoin Capital

  • Inverting The Human-Agent Relationship - Multicoin Capital

  • The Great Energy Coordination Problem - Multicoin Capital

• https://x.com/shayonsengupta

What we cover

Where does Crypto Alpha come from?

Why compute networks win when they’re vertically integrated (RNDR)

Why DePIN tokens dump even with PMF

Why memecoins and stable coins are overrated

Key moments

1:32 - Shayon’s background
7:00 - Multicoin’s activist strategy
9:11 - $RNDR
14:23 - Money is made in bear markets
17:45 - Crypto’s PMF: Asset Ledger and internal Labour Markets
22:07 - DePIN tokens suck despite PMF
28:00 - $GEOD
33:10 - $JTO
37:22 - Memecoins and Stablecoins are overrated
41:16 - AAVE equity vs token
44:21 - Multicoin on DeSci

Subscribe

Watch all Supercycle episodes on Youtube
Subscribe here to get future episodes in your inbox.

Crypto is now a real capital market. In 2025, total market cap crossed $4T, and over $175B sits in BTC and ETH exchange-traded products.

Yet, most analysis still reads like 2021. Supercycle is for allocators who need structure, not headlines.

We focus on market structure, incentives, and cycle context to spot mispriced narratives, and where durable edge still exists.

We do three things:

As a subscriber, you’ll get:

• Clear theses & frameworks you can sanity-check in an Investment Committee

• Sector deep-dives where market narratives lag reality

• Case studies on what worked, what failed, and what breaks next

First drop: Inside Multicoin’s $5.9B Crypto Investment Playbook, with Investment Partner Shayon Sengupta breaking down how their fund thinks about edge, market structure, and where the next cycle’s winners are.

Subscribe to get the episode + briefing in your inbox.

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