Bittensor's TAO nearly doubled in March due to breakthroughs in the decentralized LLM space. Bittensor’s native token, TAO, surged nearly 100% during March 2026, rising from approximately $180 to around $317, pushing the network’s market capitalization past $3 billion. This rally was primarily driven by a major technical milestone on Subnet 3 (Templar): the successful training of Covenant-72B, a competitive language model with 72 billion parameters. This LLM was trained entirely using general-purpose hardware and publicly available internet data across more than 70 globally distributed nodes—without any centralized coordination. The model achieved a solid score of 67.1 on the MMLU benchmark, comparable to Meta’s Llama 2 70B, marking the largest permissionless, decentralized LLM pre-training run to date.