🚨 BREAKING: A new "AI-Driven Proof-of-Work" (PoW) era is projected to emerge in 2026, as crypto compute markets provide a vital secondary life for non-frontier AI hardware facing massive depreciation. $BTC
The primary catalyst is the aggressive AI Capex cycle, which is creating a "depreciation trap" where today's cutting-edge chips become uncompetitive within months. To stabilize Capex recovery, a liquid compute market is forming on crypto rails, allowing hardware to seamlessly plug in, unplug, and reallocate toward the highest-yielding protocols. This evolution mirrors the early L1 PoW mining era but scales it across a global, decentralized GPU network where software efficiency defines hardware longevity. $TAO
Bittensor ($TAO ) is already serving as the blueprint for this transition, with training and inference subnets competing for a shared pool of GPUs. Miners are actively rotating compute resources to whichever protocol generates the highest returns, effectively creating a "free market" for intelligence. As we head into 2026, the ability to extend the useful life of older hardware through decentralized orchestration will become the core competitive dimension for the next generation of PoW-based networks. $HYPE