Bittensor Subnet 68 (Nova): Can Crypto Miners Find New Drugs?

Most tablets in your bathroom cabinet started life as one molecule picked out of a list so long nobody could ever actually read it. And a lot of that picking happens inside the drug companies. So, we're talking about TAO holders today. And here's the story, right? Big Pharma spends billions hunting molecules.

And a subnet on Bitensor actually pays strangers to do it. If you own Bitensor, then subnet 68 hunts for new medicines in the open. And here's what it actually really found because that's the part of the hype everyone tends to skip. It's closed billion-dollar lab versus an open network paid in tokens. And by the end of this video, you're going to know all the risks and the promises.

There's a link sitting in the description, guys. It's the first one you're going to see. I'm going to tell you what it is before we're 5 minutes into the video. And it's actually aimed at anyone who's ever bought a coin because the story sounded like world was going to change. All right?

And I think, to be honest, that's most of us at some point. We all go through different stages. We can hear AI coin and curing disease in the same sentence, and it feels like being early to something is very important. But meanwhile, the rest of our lives, the decisions that shape our health and our money get made in boardrooms that we're never going to see. We can't do much about the boardrooms, right?

But we can get much better at telling a real result from a story. And that's kind of what this channel is for. So, here's one of the biggest drug makers in the world, Pfizer, describing the stage this whole video is about. Check this clip out first.

Once a target is identified,

[music]

researchers design, make, and test molecules to find the ones that best [music] interact or interfere with the chosen target. This isn't an easy process. It takes time and patience to find the right target [music] for the condition and the right molecule that interacts with that target in the right way.

The right molecule for the target. And that's the target is usually a protein in the body linked to a disease. And the job is to find something that grips in just the right way. Now, I'm not here to try and give you a medical lesson. All right?

I'm here to tie this into how it's working with the financial world. And so, let's go into it, right? Think of the protein as a lock and the molecule is a key that has to fit it without jamming every other lock in the body at the same time. You need that to fit. Now, a lot of that first search is done on computers.

And before anyone makes a single chemical, it's called virtual screening. The program estimates how well each candidate key fits the lock, and only the most promising few get made and tested for real. Now, the better the computer short list, the less time the money gets wasted. And that's not wasted on molecules that we're never going to want. That search is only the start, right?

And after that comes lab test, animal test, years of human trials, and most candidates fail somewhere along the line. Metanovas own co-founder actually quoted the commonly cited figure of around 10 years and 2.6 billion dollars to bring one drug to market. While actually adding that estimates vary. And to be honest, the biggest players are pioneering with AI. Google's DeepMind spun on its own drug company, right?

Isomorphic Labs back in 2021. That's what we're talking about. Big labs like that have huge budgets, their own data, their own scientists, and most of what they find actually stays private. Now, that's the world Novaseq it wants to compete in. And Metanova actually makes it an interesting argument about it.

It says that closed systems are often judged by the same organizations that built them, which gives them a reason to show off their wins and quietly bury the rest. competition, it argues, pays outsiders to find the weak spots instead. That's their pitch. It's not a proven fact, but it is a fair point to weigh. And for us, there's a potential side to this, right? A personal one.

And every one of us will rely on medicines at some point, and the price and the pace of new one is shaped largely by big companies like these. So, an open alternative is worth understanding whether or not you ever buy a single token. And as always, guys, it's not financial advice. Please do your own research. This is going to be a different kind of video today, but stay with me because it all pulls back to what we need to do, okay?

And that is being in the same room as the people that know headlines, stories, how different they are to actual real data.

[music]

So, before we open up how Nova works, let's be straight about why this matters for your money, right? A coin with a great mission attached is one of the easiest things in crypto to fall in love with, and one of the hardest to judge. And I'm not telling you to buy TAO, right? There may be way better opportunities for your situation, better tokens for you to buy, but you're not going to know that just by holding the coins. You need to know what story is moving you the right or the wrong way, and to do that you need to hit the link down below and be in the correct room.

That's exactly what our Altcoin Pro course helps do, right? It's about having a plan built on evidence, so the next exciting headline doesn't make the decision for you. All you got to do is click the link in the description, guys, fill in the short form, and then book your free 15-minute call. One of the team's going to look at your own strategy and your own situation. The call itself doesn't cost anything, so if you're watching on your phone, just tap more, and under the video is the first link you'll see.

Book it while you're thinking about it, and then come back, because I'm going to show you in this video, with the evidence, what Nova has actually done and what it hasn't done. So, what is a subnet? All right, so picture a notice board with a standing prize pinned to it. Anyone in the world can take a shot. Somebody independent marks every attempt, and the best entries get paid.

Then, the next round starts straight away. BitTensor actually runs well over a hundred of these boards, each one for a different job. And the prize money is paid in tokens. So, here's how Metanova's team explained the rules on the American Startup podcast, Twist, in March 2026.

You've got the subnet owner/operator. In this case, it would be us, who's basically designing the challenges. And then miners um can be any anyone from around the world, or increasingly any form of intelligence from around the world, that's solving those problems. Validators are then given a scorecard, let's call it, and basically selecting, reaching a consensus, and selecting which ones are the winners for each competition. So, these are like competitions that are running 24/7.

Think about a hackathon that never sleeps.

A hackathon, right, that never sleeps. And that's a competition where people race to build something clever, except this one runs around the clock. Nova went live on subnet 68 on the 1st of March 2025. Metanova described it as a race to find molecules that grip key drug targets most strongly, and that's out of a huge database while being something a chemist could actually make. Here's the scoring in plain English.

Metanova picks a target, miners sending molecules, and validators run each one through an open AI model that actually predicts how tightly it would stick to the target. And the strongest that's predicted fits earn the rewards. So, the model during the judging has changed over time. In December 2025, Nova moved to scoring bill on bolts two. That's an open module from MIT and the drug company Recursion.

And the haystack is enormous, right? Here's one of the Nova team on a Bitensor community call in May 2026.

So, models are getting better and better and the predictions are valuable to have, but the chemical universe is huge. And the common on a total database that we developed is has over 61 billion potential molecules. And in the environment that we give the miners algorithms to run, it would take over 170 years to brute force this data set by running inference on every on every single possible molecule or $900,000.

Over 170 years to check them all one by one. So, if the real skill isn't raw computing power, then it's being clever about where to look. In September 2026, Met Nova said it had widened the space again to around 678 billion possible molecules. So, what has all of this produced? Well, let's stick to what Met Nova itself has said in writing, right?

First, molecules on paper. In August 2026, Met Nova wrote that the competition has produced libraries containing millions and millions of molecules across seven kinds of target. The second thing it's produced is new ways of searching. One of Nova's competition rewards better ways of searching, okay? And that's rather than single molecules.

And this is where an open network did something genuinely interesting.

I think the the beauty of this system is that in the way that we have designed this problem is that you don't need a background in this field to participate. We've like reduced it to a search problem and that's actually led to very interesting results. So, for example, in our second incentive mechanism that's focused on chemical search algorithms, we saw somebody apply an optimization strategy that's never before been used in drug discovery outperform a well-established industry technique across a number of targets across a number of challenges.

Third, they step into the real world and in April 2026 Nova added a second kind of drug candidate, nanobodies, which are actually tiny antibody fragments and said the top 50 designs would be tested in a wet lab, meaning a real laboratory with a partner called Yarrowtin. All right, 2 weeks after the competition opened Metacomp said it had received 3,000 nanobody designs and that the predicted quality of the submissions had actually improved quickly over that fortnight. Now, in May 2026 it also announced a partnership with a company called One Pot which runs an AI-driven robotic chemistry lab to make new small molecules on the other side of the screening. And in the same August 2026 article Metacomp actually said its first batch of small molecules was being made and tested. That selected nanobodies were being produced for independent testing.

So, here's what that means, right? And what it doesn't mean. Being tested is not the same as working and as of the 9th of October 2026 I can't find any published lab results for those tests. I found no sign of Nova drug in human trials and certainly no approved medicine, right? So, if you see a post claiming otherwise, look for the team's own words before you believe it.

By the time you watch this, maybe there is something. Make sure you let me know in the comments if there is. And to be fair to Metacomp, they're actually refreshingly careful about this themselves. When the host pushed them for a number how much cheaper they could make drug discovery, here's what happened.

This is where Pedro's going to be like, do not throw a number because then we're not being accurate. So, I'm I'm going to I'm going to refrain from from falling into the honeypot.

you're allowed to just riff. No one's going to No one's watching, you're fine.

I'll tell you some things, yeah. But also it's like we need we need to be rigorous or else like everything falls apart. Like, do you want to scam? We can scam, but that's not what we're here for.

I'll take that over a made-up anytime. All right, but you're probably thinking how does any of this touch your TAO? Well, from February 2025 under an upgrade called dynamic TAO, every subnet has had its own token and it's called an alpha token. Nova's is the token for subnet 68, the miners, the validators and the team behind the subnet are all rewarded in that alpha token. And the amount of new tokens each subnet gets depends on where the holders put their money.

Here's Metacomp's chief science officer, Pedro Pena. Check this out.

So, I thought the best way to to talk about staking is to see this as a way to vote on the subnets that are uh that you that you believe, right? Um depending on the amount of stake that is flowing through the different subnets, the chain is going to define how much emission the subnets are going to be receiving. So, it is also a mechanism for you to vote with your power.

Emission just means newly created tokens being handed out. So, if you swap TAO into Nova's alpha token, then you're voting for the one subnet with your own money. In practice, each subnet has its own pool where the TAO and the subnet's alpha token are actually swapped against each other. And when more people want in, the alpha token's price in TAO goes up. And when people leave, it goes down and there's no promise anyone will be on the other side at a good price whenever you want out because those pools are usually a lot smaller than the market for it itself.

Now, if you hold plenty of TAO and your bet is spread across the whole network, then you hold a subnet token and you're making a much narrower bet on one team, one competition, and also one market. So, let's be grown-up about the risks. Number one, there's no drug. Everything Nova has produced by early October 2026 was predictions and designs. And the lab tests are the first real check.

Plenty of molecules that look brilliant on a computer do nothing useful in a dish. Number two, the score is a model's opinion, okay? Miners are rewarded for what an AI model predicts. And if the model is wrong about a target, then the network can get very good at chasing the wrong thing. Met Nova Labs actually say results will feed back to improve the scoring, which is the right idea, but it has to be shown.

Now, number three, rewards aren't revenue. Miners are paid newly created tokens and not by customers. So, Met Nova says it's first it's subnet's first customer itself and actually argues that the subnets which last will be the ones producing things outside the world will pay for. I actually agree and as of again, the 15th of October 2026, that's exactly the test it hasn't passed. Four subnet tokens are different animals, right?

Their markets are smaller than TAOs and they can move much faster in both directions. Now, BitTensor actually keeps changing its own rules and on the 28th of September 2026, the OpenTensor Foundation proposed a new layer called gamma Token. It's only a proposal, but every change like that can actually shift how rewards flow. And five, the hype. A story about curing disease is the perfect thing to sell a coin.

That's not Meta Nova's fault, but it's our job not to get carried along by it. So, if you hold this token or you're enjoying Nova, then here's what would actually move from promised to proof. The lab results from the first batch of molecules and those 50 nanobodies published, good or bad. And an outside drug company paying to use the network, not just partners on a press release. And to be honest, whether the open competitions keep turning up methods like the search strategy like the closed labs didn't think of first.

Tell me in the comments, guys, would you rather a new medicine came out of the open network like this or are you happier trusting the big labs with something this serious? Let me know in the comments and if you like seeing receipts like this behind a big story before you put your money near it, simply press the subscribe button. Here's where I land. Nova has built a real working competition and some genuinely clever search tools. That's more than a lot of AI coins can say, but it hasn't produced a medicine.

And until the lab results come back, the honest label on it is a promising experiment. It's not a cure. So, guys, I'll leave you with that. As always, stay bullish. Oh.