A Bittensor Developer Dumped 37,000 TAO Crypto and Quit the Network: Is the Governance Crisis Just Getting Started?

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Ahmed Barakat

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Ahmed Barakat

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Aug 2025

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Ahmed Balaha is a journalist and copywriter based in Georgia with a growing focus on blockchain technology, DeFi, AI, privacy, digital assets, and fintech innovation.

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Last updated: 

April 15, 2026

Bittensor TAO crypto token is trading near $249, down over 4.5% in 24 hours and nearly 68% off its all-time high of $767.68, after one of the most damaging governance crises in the project’s history.

The question isn’t just whether the price recovers. It’s whether the trust does. Covenant AI’s abrupt exit from the network has exposed a fault line that technical analysis alone can’t price in.

On April 11, Covenant AI publicly quit the Bittensor subnet, accusing co-founder Jacob Steeves of holding disproportionate control over governance.

The announcement immediately triggered panic selling. Analyst Michaël van de Poppe identified the core accelerant: Covenant’s founder dumped 37,000 TAO into the market, igniting a cascade of liquidations that sent TAO down nearly 25% from $330 to a low of $265.

The team has since responded with the Teutonic-I update and governance proposal BIT-0011, designed to prevent coordinated subnet exits from triggering similar sell-offs.

Whether that’s enough to stabilize sentiment is the only chart that matters right now. Broader crypto market conditions add an additional layer of complexity to TAO’s recovery timeline.

Can Bittensor (TAO) Crypto Price Recover Above $281 or Is Another Leg Down Coming?

TAO is currently testing one of the most critical support zones in its recent history: the $250–$263 band. Technical structure is bearish, the daily MACD has posted a clear bearish crossover, the token has now rejected a multi-month descending trendline twice, and the most recent swing high ($390) printed a lower high after the $475 peak.

Social mentions surged 340% and search interest spiked, a pattern that historically precedes sharp two-way moves rather than clean directional trends.

TAO crypto right now is all about whether confidence comes back or keeps fading, because if governance stabilizes and that proposal passes, that is where sentiment flips fast, and price can reclaim $281, opening the door toward $330 and restoring the whole AI narrative around it.

More realistically, though, trust takes time to rebuild, so price likely chops between $250 and $281 while buyers slowly absorb selling pressure and the market waits for clearer signals.

The risk is that if things keep deteriorating, because if more subnets leave and governance keeps failing, that $250 level becomes fragile, and once it breaks on a higher timeframe close, the downside opens quickly toward the low $200s or even lower if panic kicks in.

At a $2.55 billion market cap and ranked #38, TAO isn’t a project on the margins. But right now, price action is hostage to governance news, not technicals.

LiquidChain Targets Early Mover Upside as Bittensor Tests Key Levels

TAO’s governance crisis is a reminder that decentralized infrastructure is only as strong as its coordination layer, and that even projects with compelling AI narratives can crater on structural trust failures.

For traders watching TAO bleed through support, the risk-reward calculus at current levels is genuinely uncertain. That’s prompting rotation into earlier-stage infrastructure plays where entry price still carries asymmetric upside.

LiquidChain (LIQUID) is a Layer 3 infrastructure project currently in presale at $0.01449, having raised $673,819.16 to date.

The core proposition: fuse Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana liquidity into a single execution environment, what the project calls a Unified Liquidity Layer. Developers deploy once and access all three ecosystems simultaneously, with sub-second finality and verifiable settlement built into the architecture (a detail that matters more as cross-chain complexity becomes the dominant DeFi bottleneck).

Institutional interest in cross-chain infrastructure is accelerating. Presale assets carry substantial risk, including illiquidity and the possibility of total loss, DYOR before committing capital.

Visit LiquidChain Here