Glossary

The terms you will meet across the BASE docs, defined once. Where a term has a fixed value or behavior in the canonical subnet, the value is noted.

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Subnet

A subnet is a single network instance on Bittensor. BASE is one subnet that runs multiple challenges under one validator network. See what is BASE?.

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netuid

The netuid is the subnet’s id on the Bittensor chain. For BASE it is 100. You set this value wherever you point a wallet, submitter, or validator at the subnet.

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Challenge

A challenge is an independent repository and Docker image that defines a specific competition: its own submissions, scoring logic, database, and public routes. Challenges expose a standard internal weight contract to the subnet. See challenges explained.

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Miner

A miner is a participant that produces work. A miner picks a challenge, follows that challenge’s submission contract, and earns when the challenge exports a raw weight for the miner’s hotkey. See miners and validators.

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Validator

A validator is a participant that publishes the final scores on-chain. On BASE a normal validator runs the submit-only on-chain submitter: it reads the master’s final normalized vector and submits it to Bittensor. It runs no challenge orchestration. See running a validator.

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Weights

Weights are the scores assigned to miners. Each challenge computes raw per-hotkey weights; the subnet normalizes them, applies emissions, and maps them to UIDs to form the vector submitted on-chain. See weights and emissions.

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Emissions

Emissions describe how influence is split across challenges, and ultimately how tokens are distributed to participants. Each active challenge carries an emission share; the subnet normalizes those shares across active challenges before combining scores. See the incentive mechanism.

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UID

A UID is a neuron’s unique slot id within the subnet. The subnet maps miner hotkeys to UIDs when building the final weight vector. A hotkey with no known UID, and UID 0, are skipped during aggregation.

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Hotkey

A hotkey is the operational signing key. Miners sign submissions with their hotkey, and the validator submitter needs exactly one secret: the validator hotkey. In the canonical settings the wallet hotkey defaults to default.

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Coldkey

A coldkey is the custody and ownership key. It holds funds and ownership and stays off operational nodes. The validator submitter guidance is explicit: never place coldkey material on the node, in logs, or in evidence files; copy only the hotkey. See wallets and registration.

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Epoch

An epoch is the recurring interval on which the subnet recomputes and republishes weights. The master runs a weight epoch on a fixed interval (epoch_interval_seconds, default 360), and the validator submitter polls and submits on its own interval. The on-chain submitter publishes the final vector at these boundaries. See the weights pipeline.

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