What's Driving Token Prices? April 15, 2026

TAO (-26%) - Bittensor, the artificial intelligence-focused Layer-1, saw the departure of three of its largest projects, known as “subnets”. This past week, Covenant AI, which operates three of the largest subnets (Templar, Basilica, and Grail), announced it would leave Bittensor after a dispute with one of Bittensor’s co-founders over TAO emissions, part of which are to be directed to individual subnets. Covenant’s founder, Sam Dare, called Bittensor’s governance process “theater of decentralization,” claiming that Bittensor co-founder Jacob Steeves had unilaterally changed TAO emissions. Dare also alleged that Steeves removed moderation abilities over its community channels, unilaterally deprecated subnet infrastructure, and even timed token sales to apply operational pressure on subnets. Steeves has refuted all these allegations, but this did little to stem the damage with TAO’s token price sliding -26% WoW and the broader community questioning Bittensor’s governance structure.
SCR (-4.9%) - Layer-2 protocol Scroll announced yesterday it would undergo major cost reductions after it lost its largest application two months ago. Neobank Ether.fi migrated from Scroll to Optimism, another Layer-2, in February, taking about $160M in TVL with it. Scroll reportedly earned about $13M in annualized fees from Ether.fi’s operations on its blockchain, and the loss of income has pushed the L2 to dissolve its Security Council and transfer control of the network to an account managed by an internal team. Currently, Scroll is ranked #15 in TVL of all Layer-2s, with about $23M TVL.
DOLO (-2.9%) - This past week, the money market protocol Dolomite was saddled with about $400M in bad debt after the Trump-backed project, World Liberty Financial, borrowed $75M in stablecoins from Dolomite, using its WLFI token as collateral. The loan effectively maxed out the lending pool, so no lenders can redeem their stablecoins from the protocol, and the protocol could incur bad debt if there is a liquidation (as WLFI is very thinly traded). There are also concerns of insider dealings, as Dolomite’s co-founder is also the CTO of World Liberty Financial. To make matters worse, Justin Sun, founder of the Tron blockchain, accused World Liberty of hiding a wallet-freeze function and of freezing about $100M worth of his WLFI tokens. The dispute, which escalated online, is supposedly being settled in court. Dolomite saw a -32% decline in deposits following the incident, but this has since bounced back.
COW (-0.6%) - Yesterday, decentralized exchange aggregator CoW Swap suffered a frontend exploit after the website was hit with a DNS attack. The team was quick to warn the community about the exploit to help mitigate major customer losses, while stating that the backend protocols and connected APIs were secure. As an aggregator, CoW Swap connects to many other DeFi protocols such as Aave, Sky, Uniswap, and Curve, none of which appear to have been impacted as of now. The CoW Swap team also paused the backend protocol as a precaution. As of now, it appears that no major losses have occurred but the situation is still unfolding.

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