Bittensor Founder Jacob Steeves Confirms Templar Subnet Collapsed After Team Member Sold Token Stake

Bittensor founder Jacob Steeves confirmed on This Week in Startups with Jason Calacanis that Templar, a decentralized training subnet on Bittensor, fell apart after a team member sold their token stake and left, publicly calling Steeves an "evil dictator" on the way out. Steeves said reputational trust, once broken, does not come back.
Steeves explained that subnet alpha tokens trade on a live secondary market, allowing a team to exit visibly in one sale, unlike illiquid startup equity. He said Bittensor's answer is "conviction locking" — voluntary and unenforced — which lets a team lock its tokens, sometimes perpetually, in a way every other holder can see. He advised checking whether a subnet's team has locked tokens before taking a position, and said a significant number of builders in the ecosystem are scammers.