Subnet Session with Tommi from MVTRX: Subnet 79

This session begins with Mark and Siam chatting about a proposed new Bittensor “shorting mechanism” aimed at punishing malicious or gaming subnets by letting markets drive their alpha toward zero and trigger deregistration—while flagging obvious risks like self-shorting by subnet owners and the broader concern that changing market rules can make the ecosystem feel less investable. They then bring on Tommi from Subnet 79 (rebranded from “Taos” to “MVTRX”), who explains they’re building a state-of-the-art exchange for Bittensor dTAO/alpha tokens, paired with a sophisticated sandbox simulation framework (C++/Rust) where miners can test trading algorithms under many parallel, realistic limit-order-book simulations before deploying to live trading. The core problem they’re tackling is that alpha markets can be illiquid and risky—especially during “black swan” events—so they want to improve liquidity, reduce slippage, and enable larger players to manage/rebalance portfolios more efficiently using advanced order types and a dynamic incentive model that shifts rewards/fees between makers and takers depending on market conditions (e.g., paying makers more during crash-like imbalances to stabilize markets). On monetization, Tommi outlines two revenue streams: (1) exchange fees from live trading (a steady flow) and (2) selling high-fidelity simulated high-frequency/L3 order book data (chunkier, periodic revenue), with an expectation of beta access for miners and broader user/UI growth later in the year; he also notes revenue would likely be split between buybacks (roughly ~25–50%) and ongoing development rather than burning.