SUBMIT A PRSUBMIT AN ISSUElast edit: Mar 06, 2025

Validating in Bittensor

All mining and validating in Bittensor occurs within a subnet. Each subnet independently produces the digital commodities that are its purpose, each subnet creator defining a different incentive mechanism for validators to use in judging miners' work. The validator's work is to apply this incentive mechanism to miners, using it to score their performance, and then to submit these weights to the Bittensor blockchain. It is validators scores of miners' performance that determines the proportion of the subnet's emissions allocated to each miner, according to the Yuma Consensus algorithm. See Emissions.

Browse the subnets and explore links to their code repositories on Taostats' subnets listings.

Typical compute requirements

Each subnet may have distinct hardware requirements, but this minimum requirements template for subnet creators may give an idea of minimum memory, bandwidth and storage requirements for a typical subnet node.

Validating is not supported on Windows.

Requirements for validation

To have a validator permit in a given subnet and be listed as active, allowing you to submit miner evaluations using the set_weights function, you must meet the following requirements:

• Your hotkey must be registered, granting you a UID on the subnet

• You must have a stake weight on the subnet of least 1000, including stake delegated to your hotkey from other wallets' coldkeys. A validator's stake weight in a subnet equals their alpha stake plus their TAO stake times the tao_weight parameter (current value: 0.18):

  $$\text{Validator stake weight} = \alpha + 0.18 \times \tau$$

• You must be one of the top 64 validators in the subnet, ranked by stake weight.

Validator registration

To participate as a validator, you must first register your keys with the subnet in order to receive a UID on that subnet.

A subnet can have a maximum of 64 active subnet validator UIDs and 192 subnet miner UIDs (256 total).

Upon registration, your hotkey, which is part of your wallet, becomes the holder of the UID slot.

btcli subnet register --netuid <desired netuid> --wallet.name  <wallet name> --hotkey <your hotkey>

Acquiring stake

A validator's consensus weight and emissions depend on their hotkey's stake weight. You can stake your own TAO to your validator hotkey, or advertise your hotkey to others and seek stake. Any wallet's coldkey can stake to any hotkey, subsequently receiving emissions from that stake.

Delegation

See StakingDelegation

Add stake

# Stake funds to your hotkey account within the subnet.
btcli stake add --wallet.name <wallet name> --wallet.hotkey <your validating hotkey>

Calculate TAO required

The amount of TAO needed to acquire a validator permit depends on how the other largest 64 wallets distribute TAO across themselves. You can calculate the minimum using bt.metagraph:

import bittensor as bt
subnet = bt.metagraph(1)
top_64_stake = sorted(subnet.S)[-64:]
print (f'Current requirement for validator permits based on the top 64 stake stands at {min(top_64_stake)} tao')

Check the permit status

Replace the string values for the name (<my_coldkey>) and hotkey (<my_validator_hotkey>) with your own.
This information can be obtained from the metagraph using your UID.

import bittensor as bt
subnet = bt.metagraph(1)
wallet = bt.wallet( name = 'my_coldkey', hotkey = 'my_validator_hotkey' )
my_uid = subnet.hotkeys.index( wallet.hotkey.ss58_address )
print(f'Validator permit: {subnet.validator_permit(my_uid)}')

Inspecting UIDs

After you obtain a UID slot, you can view the status of your registered wallet by running:

btcli wallet overview --netuid

After providing your wallet name at the prompt, you will see output like:

Parameter	Value	Description
COLDKEY	my_coldkey	The name of the coldkey associated with your slot.
HOTKEY	my_first_hotkey	The name of the hotkey associated with your slot.
UID	5	The index of the uid out of available uids.
ACTIVE	True	Whether or not the uid is considered active.
STAKE(τ)	71.296	The amount of stake in this wallet.
RANK	0.0629	This miner's absolute ranking according to validators on the network.
TRUST	0.2629	This miner's trust as a proportion of validators on the network.
CONSENSUS	0.89	This validator's aggregate consensus score.
INCENTIVE	0.029	This miner's incentive, TAO emission, is attained via mining.
DIVIDENDS	0.001	This validator's dividends, TAO emission, are attained via validating.
EMISSION	29_340_153	This miner's total emission in RAO (10^(-9) TAO) per block.
VTRUST	0.96936	This validator's trust score as a validator.
VPERMIT	*	Whether this miner is considered active for validating on this subnetwork.
UPDATED	43	Blocks since this miner set weights on the chain.
AXON	131.186.56.85:8091	The entrypoint advertised by this miner on the bittensor blockchain.
HOTKEY_SS58	5F4tQyWr...	The ss58-encoded address of the miner's hotkey.

Meaning of ACTIVE

In the above table, the ACTIVE row applies only to UIDs that are subnet validators. It shows whether the UID is actively setting weights within the activity_cutoff window. If the UID has not set weights on the blockchain for the activity_cutoff duration, then the Yuma Consensus will consider this subnet validator offline, i.e., turned off (False).

Checking the registration status

Use any of the Python code fragments below:

• Using Python interpreter: Type "python" or "python3" on your macOS or Linux terminal, then copy/paste one of these snippets.
• Using a Python file: Copy a code snippet into, for example, check_reg.py, then run python3 check_reg.py.

With SS58 hotkey

import bittensor as bt
# Replace below with your SS58 hotkey 
hotkey = "5HEo565WAy4Dbq3Sv271SAi7syBSofyfhhwRNjFNSM2gP9M2"
network = "finney"
sub = bt.subtensor(network)
print(f"Registration status for hotkey {hotkey} is: {sub.is_hotkey_registered(hotkey)}")

With SS58 hotkey and netuid

import bittensor as bt
# Replace below with your SS58 hotkey 
hotkey = "5HEo565WAy4Dbq3Sv271SAi7syBSofyfhhwRNjFNSM2gP9M2"
network = "finney"
netuid = 1 # subnet uid
sub = bt.subtensor(network)
mg = sub.metagraph(netuid)
if hotkey not in mg.hotkeys:
  print(f"Hotkey {hotkey} deregistered")
else:
  print(f"Hotkey {hotkey} is registered")

With UID and SS58 hotkey

import bittensor as bt
# Replace below with your SS58 hotkey 
hotkey = "5HEo565WAy4Dbq3Sv271SAi7syBSofyfhhwRNjFNSM2gP9M2"
network = "finney"
netuid = 1 # subnet uid
sub = bt.subtensor(network)
mg = sub.metagraph(netuid)
uid = 2 # Your UID
registered = mg.hotkeys[uid] == hotkey
if not registered:
  print(f"Miner at uid {uid} not registered")
else:
  print(f"Miner at uid {uid} registered")