Miners and validators

Every participant inside a subnet is a neuron. Miners produce work, validators judge it, and the chain pays both from the same emission stream.

Neurons, UIDs, and hotkeys

A neuron is a registered participant on a specific subnet. Registering a hotkey grants it a UID — a numbered slot on that subnet. The same hotkey can hold a UID on several subnets at once, but each registration is separate and each costs its own fee.

Whether a neuron behaves as a miner or a validator is not a setting on the chain; it is determined by what software you run and whether your hotkey holds a validator permit. Permits are granted to the highest stake-weighted neurons, up to a per-subnet limit, and are recalculated every epoch. Without a permit, weights you submit are ignored.

Validator permits are competitive

The permit limit is a subnet hyperparameter. Acquiring one requires enough stake weight to rank inside that limit, so validating is capital-intensive in a way that mining is not.

What a miner does

A miner runs the subnet's miner software on its own hardware and exposes an endpoint — an axon — that validators can query. When a validator sends a request, the miner responds with whatever the subnet asks for: a model completion, a retrieved document, a prediction, a rendered image.

The miner's job reduces to three things:

Stay online. A miner that does not answer receives no score.
Answer within the subnet's latency budget. Slow responses are commonly penalised or discarded.
Answer better than the competition. Scoring is relative, so absolute quality matters less than your rank.

Do not mine on the owner's hotkey

Miner emission directed at hotkeys associated with the subnet owner is never paid out — it is recycled or burned depending on the subnet's configuration. Always register your own hotkey.

What a validator does

A validator runs the subnet's validator software, which queries miners, evaluates their responses using the subnet's scoring mechanism, and submits a vector of weights to the chain. Each weight expresses how much of the subnet's miner emission that validator believes a particular miner deserves.

Validators earn from the validator share of emission, and they share it with anyone who has delegated stake to them, minus the validator's take. This is the mechanism behind delegation, covered in Delegating and staking.

The epoch cycle

Each subnet runs on a cycle called its tempo, measured in blocks. The chain default is 360 blocks — roughly 72 minutes — but owners can change it. At each epoch boundary the following happens:

Validators have been querying and scoring miners throughout the epoch, submitting weights on chain.
Yuma Consensus combines those weights, weighted by each validator's stake, into ranks, trust, consensus, and incentive.
Accumulated alpha is distributed: 18% to the owner, and the remainder split evenly between miners and validators.
Validator permits are recalculated based on current stake weight.

Expect a delay before you earn

Emissions are credited only at epoch boundaries, and validators typically refresh their view of the metagraph periodically rather than every block. A freshly registered miner can sit at zero incentive for a while before validators begin querying it. That lag is exactly what the immunity period exists to cover.

Incentive, trust, and consensus

Yuma Consensus produces several per-neuron scores. They are easy to confuse, so it is worth being precise about what each one means.

Score	Meaning
Incentive	A miner's normalised share of the subnet's miner emission. This is the number that determines what a miner is paid.
Trust	How consistently validators agree that this neuron deserves weight, as opposed to a single validator favouring it.
Consensus	The stake-weighted, clipped agreement across validators, which is what dampens the influence of any one voter.
Dividends	A validator's share of the validator emission, before its take is deducted and the rest paid to delegators.
Rank	The raw weight a neuron received before normalisation into incentive.

Consensus is what makes the system resistant to a validator simply voting for itself or for a colluding miner. A weight far outside what other validators submit is clipped, so an outlier voter cannot unilaterally redirect emission.

How TaoScope uses these

The miner leaderboard on each subnet page ranks neurons by incentive, because incentive is the value that maps directly to TAO earned. Multiplying a miner's normalised incentive by the subnet's miner emission pool gives its current daily earnings. Definitions for every displayed field are in the metrics glossary.