Miners and validators

BASE has two participant roles: miners produce work, and validators publish the final scores on-chain. This page explains what each one does.

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Miners

A miner competes in a challenge. Miners do not build against subnet-specific scoring logic. You choose a challenge, follow that challenge’s submission contract, and use the subnet to reach the challenge’s public surface. The miner flow is:

1. Choose the challenge you want to compete in.
2. Read the challenge repository and its miner guide.
3. Build the required submission artifact for that challenge.
4. Submit through the challenge’s public route, exposed by the subnet.
5. Track challenge-specific status, reports, and leaderboards.
6. Improve your submission based on challenge feedback.
7. Earn rewards when the challenge exports a raw weight for your hotkey and the subnet normalizes it into final subnet weights.

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Validators

A validator runs the on-chain submitter: it fetches the master’s final normalized vector from the weights API and submits it to Bittensor. Challenge services run on the manager node, not on the submitter. The submitter is deliberately minimal:

• It is a single systemd-managed process on the validator node.
• It needs exactly one secret: the validator hotkey.
• It opens no control-plane database connection. It only talks to the master over HTTP and to the chain.
• It polls the master’s weights endpoint, then submits the fetched vector on-chain for the configured netuid.

The default weights endpoint the submitter reads is /v1/weights/latest on the master.

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Light validation: delegated stake

If the validator infrastructure requirements are too high, operators can use the Bittensor CHK / stake weight check flow to give validator power to the recommended subnet validator hotkey instead of running the submitter stack themselves.

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Who runs the challenges?

Neither miners nor normal validators run the challenge services. Those run on the subnet manager (Swarm manager) node, scheduled as Docker Swarm services pinned to the manager. A normal validator only reads the master weight vector and submits it on-chain.

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