Revenue Search: Inside Bittensor Subnet Session with Brendan Playford from Gopher: Subnet 42
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Oct 24, 2025 Brendan Playford, the innovative founder of Gopher and operator of Subnet 42, dives into the future of cryptographic data infrastructure for developers and finance. He discusses the evolution from Masa to Gopher, focusing on verified, AI-ready data solutions. The conversation highlights their new trading tool, which boasts a 65% win rate, and plans for users to govern revenue within the community. Additionally, Brendan shares insights on the role of miners and the unique mechanics behind Subnet 42's success.
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Verified AI-Ready Data Via One API
- Gopher delivers cryptographically verified, AI-ready data via a single API and UI to reduce reliance on black-box datasets.
- Brendan argues this unlocks differentiated models by providing verifiable, structured web, social, and financial feeds.
Pivot From Uncollateralized Lending To Data
- Masa began as an uncollateralized lending product that scraped bank and credit data for DeFi lending and ran on its own node network.
- The product-market fit failed and the team pivoted the scraping infrastructure toward general web-scale data collection.
Why Token Complexity Exists
- Masa originally had its own ERC-20 token and rewarded node operators before joining BitTensor as a subnet.
- Brendan emphasizes dual-token history explains current token complexity and governance trade-offs.