Incentive mechanism

The incentive mechanism is the set of rules that decide who earns and how much. On BASE, rewards follow verifiable work: a challenge scores what a miner actually produced, and the subnet converts those scores into on-chain weights.

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The core idea

Challenge scores are never submitted directly to Bittensor. Every score passes through the subnet, which applies a per-challenge emission share and normalizes across all active challenges before anything reaches the chain. The flow is:

1. The challenge evaluates miner work.
2. The challenge exports raw hotkey weights.
3. The subnet applies that challenge’s emission share.
4. The subnet normalizes across active challenge outputs.
5. The subnet maps hotkeys to Bittensor UIDs.
6. Validators submit the final weights on-chain.

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Two levers decide your reward

The aggregator multiplies these together for every hotkey, sums per UID, and normalizes the result. See weights and emissions for the exact computation.

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Why it is built this way

• Isolation. Each challenge owns its scoring, so a flaw in one challenge does not corrupt another’s rewards. If a challenge fails, the subnet can isolate its contribution.
• Verifiability. Challenges are designed so the work is evaluated, not self-reported. PRISM, for example, re-executes a miner’s training loop and computes the score itself rather than trusting miner-reported numbers.
• One vector. Many separate scores collapse into a single normalized weight vector, which is what Bittensor expects per subnet.

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Where weights go

The on-chain submitter reads the master’s final vector and submits it to Bittensor for netuid 100 at each epoch. Rewards then follow Bittensor’s own emission rules for the subnet.

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