$TAO just lost -9% in a day — and this one had a reason hiding under the flush.
The tape: TAO chopped $246–$260 all day on Oct 29, nothing dramatic. Then the 20:00 UTC hour — the same flush hour that washed NEAR, ARB, WLD, ENA and ONDO tonight — O $252.90, L $233.60, C $237.90 on $7.66M. That's the day's biggest hourly bar by miles, and it took -6.6% out of the price in sixty minutes. The 21:00 dead-cat bounced to $244.20 and got rejected on the spot. 22:00 closed $237.80, 23:00 closed $234.20. Live ~$232.50, UNCLOSED — that's live tape, not a level.
Here's what makes TAO different from tonight's other flushes: the poison was already in the tape. Last Friday, Covenant AI — a prominent subnet developer — announced it's leaving Bittensor, citing "centralized control" and unilateral policy changes by co-founder Jacob Steeves. Founder Sam Dare said it on X himself. TAO fell 10%+ in two hours, $338 to $285, and was already down ~24% from above $300 before tonight. CoinDesk has AI tokens as the hardest-hit sector again: NEAR -7.8%, TAO with it, $337M in liquidations over 24h (+84%), $205M of that longs. Investors have been rotating out of TAO into NEAR, ICP, RENDER and FET all week.
The honest side: this is rank #37, a $2.71B coin — not a dying project. 1h RSI 24 is the oversold edge. Down -69% from the $757.60 ATH, and the real overhang here is the governance fracture, not the chart.
Levels: $244.20 (dead-cat high — hourly close above = flush losing steam); $252.90 (pre-flush zone — reclaim with volume = flush failed); $233.60 (flush-bar low — a closed hour under it and the next shelf is the September swing low near $215).
Not a call, either way. Question for the overnight tape: does the Covenant overhang keep dragging TAO under $233.60, or does the oversold bounce reclaim $244.20 first?