Getting TAO

Trades spend native TAO on Bittensor. There are three ways to get it into your wallet, and the one most people need involves no bridge and no extra transaction.

Send TAO from an exchange

This is the cheapest route and it surprises people, so it is worth explaining rather than just asserting.

Your EVM address and its Bittensor address are not two accounts with a bridge between them. They are one account with two views. What eth_getBalance reports is that account's Substrate balance, less the 500 rao existential deposit the network keeps. Nothing else.

So TAO withdrawn from an exchange to your Bittensor address lands in your MetaMask wallet as spendable TAO. There is no conversion step, because there is nothing to convert.

Connect your wallet and open a subnet. If you hold no TAO, the panel shows your Bittensor address.
Copy it and withdraw TAO to it from your exchange.
It appears in your balance once the withdrawal confirms. No further action.

The address is derived from your wallet, so it is yours alone and it does not change. Only your wallet can spend what arrives there.

Send TAO on Bittensor, not a wrapped TAO on another chain. A token that merely has TAO in its name, sent from a different network, will not arrive.

Unwrap wTAO

wTAO is wrapped TAO on Bittensor itself, the same idea as WETH. If you hold it, your value is already on the right chain in the wrong form.

When you have wTAO and no TAO, the trade panel offers to unwrap the whole balance in one click. It is a single transaction on the chain you are already on.

Bridge USDC in

If your value is on Ethereum, Base or Solana as USDC, bridge it to Bittensor and swap it for TAO. This is the only route that crosses chains, so it is the slowest and the only one with a bridge fee.

See Bridge for how that works.

Which to use

You hold	Route	Cost
TAO on an exchange	Withdraw to your Bittensor address	The exchange's withdrawal fee only
wTAO on Bittensor	Unwrap in the trade panel	One transaction of gas
USDC on Ethereum, Base or Solana	Bridge, then swap to TAO	Bridge fee, swap fee, price impact
ETH and nothing else	Swap to USDC first, then bridge	As above, plus the swap

A note on ETH

There is currently no direct route from ETH to TAO. Bittensor has one bridge route reaching it and that route carries USDC, so ETH has to become USDC somewhere before it can cross. If you are starting from ETH, the exchange route is usually simpler than the on-chain one.

Gas

Gas is paid in TAO. Keep a small amount spare rather than staking your entire balance, or the transaction that spends it cannot be paid for. The Max button already holds a little back.

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