Score (SN44) Wins Paris Blockchain Week Start In Block 2026

Manako, the commercial product of Score (Subnet 44 on Bittensor), has won first place at the Start In Block 2026 startup competition during Paris Blockchain Week. The event, held on April 15 and 16 at the historic Carrousel du Louvre in Paris, brought together over 10,000 attendees from more than 100 countries. The victory cements Score as one of the most validated real-world use cases in the entire Bittensor ecosystem.

What Is Start In Block?

Start In Block is the flagship startup competition of Paris Blockchain Week (PBW), Europe’s premier institutional digital assets conference. The competition targets early-stage Web3 startups with less than $5 million in funding. In 2026, over 1,000 startups applied for a chance to pitch on the world stage. Leading investors reviewed the top 100 applications, and only 12 finalists earned a spot to pitch live before a jury of industry leaders at the Louvre.

The stakes matched the prestige. The total prize pool exceeded $10 million in funding, grants, credits, mentorship, and other growth incentives. Sponsors included Yuma Group, Cardano Foundation, Spectrum Nodes, Bit2Me, and Adevar Labs. The grand prize winner also received a direct listing opportunity from Bit2Me, providing immediate market access and broader liquidity. On top of that, Adevar Labs allocated $120,000 in audit credits to selected startups.

The final jury brought together Mykolas Majauskas from Bybit, Tomasz Kajetan Stanczak from Nethermind, and Jessi Brooks from Ribbit Capital. Paris Blockchain Week has earned a reputation for its high institutional attendance, with over 70% of attendees holding C-level positions. Winning this competition means impressing the people who sign checks, approve partnerships, and set institutional strategy.

How Score (SN44) Took the Crown

Arnaud Deffuant and Archie Grant represented Score’s team at Paris Blockchain Week. Over two days of pitching, they outlasted the entire field. As Arnaud noted after the win: out of 1,000 startups on the starting line, Manako was the last one standing. The competition featured other strong finalists from projects like Prelude, Synth, and 404 in the Bittensor track alone.

Manako did not just win the overall competition. The team also claimed the Bittensor Track, sponsored by Yuma Group, the DCG-backed accelerator dedicated to advancing decentralized AI on Bittensor. The Bittensor track jury included Greg Schvey from Yuma, alongside investors from DSV Fund and v3ntures. A Bittensor subnet project winning the overall competition at one of Europe’s largest institutional crypto conferences sends a powerful signal about the ecosystem’s growing commercial credibility.

What Does Manako Do?

Manako is a vision AI platform that turns existing camera networks into real-time intelligence systems. Businesses describe what they want to detect in plain language, and Manako handles the rest: instant alerts, insights, and automated actions across any camera, with no code and no training required.

The platform runs on Score (Subnet 44 on Bittensor), a decentralized computer vision framework where miners compete to train and serve specialized Vision Agents at global scale. Score’s approach dramatically cuts the cost and time of complex video analysis. The project entered the market through football analytics, targeting a $600 billion industry, but the technology extends far beyond sports. To learn how Score works in detail, read our full breakdown: Your Simple Guide to Score (SN44).

Growing Commercial Momentum

The Paris Blockchain Week win arrived during a period of accelerating enterprise traction for Score. On the same day the conference opened, PwC France and Maghreb announced a strategic alliance with Manako Labs to deploy physical AI at enterprise scale using Score’s decentralized infrastructure on Bittensor. The partnership targets sectors including retail, logistics, industry, energy, and public infrastructure. Learn more here.

That alliance builds on Score’s earlier breakthrough with Reading Football Club, which entered a one-year Vision AI partnership to use Manako for performance analysis and scouting support. Yuma Group’s official State of Bittensor report highlighted that deal as a notable example of real-world adoption within the ecosystem.

The Full Start In Block 2026 Results

Here are the final standings of the Start In Block 2026 competition:

First Place: Manako (also winner of the Bittensor Track by Yuma Group)

Second Place: The Risk Protocol (also winner of the DeFAI Track by Spectrum Nodes)

Third Place: Sundial Protocol (also winner of the Institutional Adoption Track by Cardano Foundation)

Each track winner earned recognition from investors, institutions, and builders across the most demanding jury panel in European digital assets.

Why This Matters for Bittensor

The Paris Blockchain Week Score (SN44) victory carries weight for multiple reasons. It puts a Bittensor-powered project in front of institutional decision-makers who may not yet know the ecosystem. PBW 2026 drew attendees from institutions like BNP Paribas, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, HSBC, and Credit Agricole. Ministers and members of the French National Assembly joined them. A Bittensor subnet winning the flagship competition at this event sends a clear signal about the quality of projects the network produces.

The timing amplifies the impact. Yuma Group sponsored the Bittensor track at Start In Block, bringing dedicated visibility to decentralized AI projects at one of Europe’s most important conferences. With DCG, Grayscale, and a growing number of institutional players backing Bittensor, events like this help bridge the gap between the ecosystem’s technical innovation and the broader financial world.

Score’s win also reinforces the narrative that Bittensor subnets are becoming real businesses with real customers. From the PwC alliance to the Reading FC partnership, Score demonstrates the kind of enterprise traction that separates serious projects from the crowd.

New to Bittensor?

If you landed here from Paris Blockchain Week and the world of Bittensor is new to you, welcome. Bittensor is a decentralized network for AI, where specialized mini-networks called subnets each focus on a specific AI task. Score (Subnet 44) is one of over 120 active subnets. To understand how the whole system works, including how validators, miners, and subnets interact, check out our explainer: How Bittensor Works: Validators, Miners, and Subnets.

Paris Blockchain Week Score (SN44) will go down as a milestone moment. The Start In Block 2026 victory, combined with accelerating enterprise partnerships and the Yuma-backed Bittensor track win, represents one of the strongest institutional validations any Bittensor project has received to date. For Score and Manako, the real work is only accelerating.

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