Key event: TAO price surged 18.76% in a single day, backed by signals of institutional positioning.
On November 1st, the native token TAO of the decentralized artificial intelligence network Bittensor broke through $520 per token, surging 18.76% compared to the previous trading day's closing price, with the 24-hour trading volume simultaneously expanding to over $1.2 billion. The direct driver of this wave of increase was the official launch of Europe’s first TAO staking exchange-traded product (ETP) — the Safello Bittensor Staked TAO ETP (trading code: STAO), jointly launched by the Nordic exchange Safello and Deutsche Bank's subsidiary Deutsche Digital Assets, which completed its listing on the Swiss Stock Exchange (SIX Swiss Exchange) on October 31st.
Product details: Cold storage endorsement + automatic compound interest, lowering the entry barrier for institutions.
According to a market analysis report by Coinotag, STAO ETP has three core advantages, allowing it to drive the spot price of TAO up by 20% within 48 hours of its launch.
Physical asset support: The underlying asset of the ETP is 100% cold-stored TAO tokens, with compliance custody services provided by Deutsche Digital Assets, addressing the core concerns of institutional investors regarding the security of crypto assets.
Automatic staking reinvestment: The product will automatically reinvest network rewards generated from TAO staking (Bittensor incentivizes developers to contribute AI models and miners to provide computing power) back into the asset pool, eliminating the need for manual operation by investors and achieving compound interest on returns.
Low fees + high liquidity: The annual management fee is only 1.49%, far lower than the industry average rate of 2.1% for similar crypto asset ETPs, and supported by the Swiss Exchange's clearing system, enabling institutional-level large transactions.
Emelie Moritz, CEO of Safello, emphasized in an interview with Yahoo Finance: 'The launch of STAO fills the gap in the European compliance market - previously, although institutional investors were concerned about Bittensor's decentralized AI infrastructure, they faced barriers like custody and compliance that made entry difficult, while the ETP product transforms it into an asset that can be directly allocated in traditional financial markets.'
Market background: The fusion of AI + blockchain has become a new opportunity for institutions.
The explosion of TAO is not an isolated event but a reflection of global institutions' layout in the 'blockchain + artificial intelligence' sector.
The technical value of the Bittensor network itself is the core support: It builds a decentralized AI model training and data sharing network through the PoS consensus mechanism, allowing developers to earn TAO rewards by contributing algorithms and computing power, while miners gain network validation rights by staking TAO, forming an 'value co-creation - incentive cycle' ecological closed loop, regarded as a benchmark project of the integration of Web3 and AI.
Industry trend resonance: Recently, the US SEC approved multiple ETFs related to Solana (SOL) and Litecoin (LTC), marking an increase in mainstream financial markets' recognition of blockchain infrastructure, while Bittensor, as a representative in the intersection of 'AI + blockchain', precisely meets institutions' demand for allocation in next-generation technological infrastructure.
Lookonchain's on-chain data monitoring shows that since mid-October, when the news of STAO ETP's upcoming launch was announced, institutions like Grayscale and JPMorgan have cumulatively increased their holdings of over 42,000 TAO, accounting for 1.8% of the total circulation, confirming institutions' long-term optimism about the decentralized AI sector.
Industry significance: A groundbreaking product in European crypto compliance.
STAO ETP is not only an important milestone in the Bittensor ecosystem but also marks the advancement of structured products in the European crypto asset market.
As the first core product of Safello's foray into the crypto structured products field, its cooperation with a subsidiary of Deutsche Bank has created a new model for 'traditional financial institutions + crypto exchanges' to jointly issue compliant products.
For the entire decentralized AI industry, the landing of STAO provides a replicable compliance path for other projects. In the future, more AI infrastructure tokens may enter the mainstream investment market in the form of ETPs, pushing the industry from 'niche narrative' to 'institutional allocation.'#加密市场回调
