Subnet Session with Iosif & Harry from Djinn: Subnet 103

This session starts with Mark and Siam briefly addressing the decision to pivot away from “Handshake”: it didn’t gain the traction they hoped, the team’s focus drifted toward building trading/mining “skills” that didn’t feel like a scalable revenue path, and they chose to “rip the band-aid off” rather than keep a zombie project alive. They argue that in AI (especially on Bittensor) things change fast, so it’s better to redeploy talented builders quickly, even if that decision attracts criticism.

The main segment features Subnet 103 “Djinn,” led by Harry Crane (stats professor with deep prediction markets/sports betting background) and Iosef Gerstein (finance + scientific startups). Djinn’s core idea is a “genius–idiot network”: profitable bettors (“geniuses”) have an edge but get limited/banned by sportsbooks, while the mass of recreational bettors (“idiots,” i.e., accounts that can still place bets) can execute. Djinn is building a trustless, privacy-preserving information exchange to connect the two—geniuses sell time-sensitive betting signals, buyers execute them wherever they have access (Bet365, Polymarket, etc.), and the protocol uses Bittensor miners/validators for verification and obfuscation (including decoys) so neither Djinn nor outsiders can easily steal signals. Revenue is expected to come from transaction fees (they discuss ~0.5% as a working idea), with buybacks/utility mechanisms considered to support alpha; they’re currently moving from fake-money testing to low-stakes real-money testing and say they’ll launch only when they’re confident it’s safe.