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Before you participate on BASE for real, you need a Bittensor wallet and a slot on the subnet. This page explains the two keys, the registration step, and the safety rules that matter most.

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Two keys, two jobs

A Bittensor wallet has two keys with very different roles:
  • Coldkey — your custody and ownership key. It holds funds and ownership. Keep it offline and off operational nodes.
  • Hotkey — your operational signing key. Miners sign submissions with it; validators submit weights with it.
The single most important safety rule: never place coldkey material on an operational node, in shell history, in logs, in screenshots, or in evidence files. Generate keys on a trusted machine and copy only the hotkey to the node that needs it.

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Generating wallets

Wallet creation and on-chain registration use Bittensor’s own tooling. See the Bittensor documentation for creating a coldkey and hotkey and for registering on a subnet. Registration places your hotkey into a UID slot on the subnet. When you register, the subnet is netuid 100.

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Pointing your wallet at the subnet

The canonical configuration identifies the wallet with a name, a hotkey, and an optional wallet path. The defaults are: 
network:
  netuid: 100
  wallet_name: default
  wallet_hotkey: default
  wallet_path: null
A validator submitter sets these to its own identity (for example a dedicated wallet name and a validator hotkey) and reads the validator hotkey from the node’s wallet path.

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Where the validator hotkey lives

The submit-only validator process needs exactly one secret: the validator hotkey file. Copy only the hotkey (not the coldkey) onto the node. The submitter expects the hotkey under the validator wallet’s hotkeys/ directory on the configured wallet path.

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If running a validator is too heavy

If the validator infrastructure requirements are too high, you do not have to run the submitter yourself. Operators can use the Bittensor CHK / stake weight check flow to give validator power to the recommended subnet validator hotkey instead. See miners and validators.

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Next

Installation

Install the role that matches your keys.

Miners & validators

What each role does with its hotkey.