BASE has two participant roles that people often confuse: validators keep the subnet vector on-chain; miners produce challenge work.
Miners
A miner competes in a challenge. You do not build against a Base-global scoring game.
- Choose a challenge
- Read that challenge’s miner documentation
- Build the required artifact
- Submit through the challenge’s public routes
- Complete any challenge-owned evaluation steps (example: Agent Challenge Phala self-deploy)
- Track challenge status and leaderboards
- Earn when the challenge exports a raw weight for your hotkey and BASE normalizes it
Start at the Miner hub or go straight to Challenges.
Validators
A BASE validator operates subnet infrastructure and submits weights. Challenge TEE allowlists and PRISM GPU tables are challenge operator concerns, documented under each challenge, not under “become a BASE miner.”
Typical validator path:
- Fetch the master’s final normalized vector
- Submit on-chain with the validator hotkey
- Reconcile challenge registry when running the full
platform validator stack
Full path: Validators.
Light validation: if infrastructure is too heavy, Bittensor CHK / stake-weight flows may let you back a recommended validator hotkey instead of running the stack.
Who runs challenge services?
Neither ordinary miners nor silent weight-only validators replace challenge service ownership. Challenge images run on the subnet manager as Swarm services. Some challenges (Agent Challenge production) additionally require miners to fund their own Phala CVMs for scored work.
Next
