Incentive Mechanism

Incentive mechanism and business logic for Subnet 49 (Nepher Robotics) on Bittensor.

Miners compete in robotics tournaments by submitting trained policies. Validators evaluate every eligible agent in standardized Isaac Lab environments, and the approved podium (top 1–3 places) earns the subnet's miner emissions during the tournament's reward period.

Tournament Cycle

Each tournament proceeds through five sequential periods:

┌──────────────────────┬────────────┬────────────┬────────────┬────────────┐
│       CONTEST        │   SUBMIT   │ EVALUATION │   REVIEW   │   REWARD   │
├──────────────────────┼────────────┼────────────┼────────────┼────────────┤
│ Miners train and     │ Uploads    │ Validators │ Admin      │ Podium     │
│ submit agents        │ continue;  │ evaluate   │ approves   │ receives   │
│                      │ eligibility│ on hidden  │ podium or  │ on-chain   │
│                      │ snapshot   │ benchmarks │ no winner  │ weight     │
└──────────────────────┴────────────┴────────────┴────────────┴────────────┘

Period	What happens
Contest	Miners train locally and upload agents signed with their Bittensor hotkey. Each upload pays a submission fee.
Submit	The final window for uploads. The eligibility snapshot is built from registered miners who have submitted, and re-synced every 5 minutes until evaluation begins.
↳ Public evaluation (optional)	If the tournament has a public evaluation config, validators score submissions on public scenes from contest start so miners see a live public leaderboard. It can continue into the submit window.
↳ Quiet zone (optional)	The gap between the end of public evaluation and the start of private evaluation (default 6 hours). No evaluations run; uploads are still accepted until contest end.
Evaluation	Validators download each eligible agent and run it on hidden EnvHub benchmark scenes with eval-nav. This produces the private leaderboard.
Review	The admin team verifies the top submissions (integrity, no cheating) and approves a podium of up to 3 places — or confirms no winner.
Reward	Validators direct the reward weight to the approved podium's UIDs for the length of the reward period.

Uploads are accepted from contest start until contest end (contest + submit windows). Period boundaries are set as Bittensor block numbers and converted to timestamps by the tournament backend. Live schedules are shown on nepher.ai/tournament.

Scoring

• Which agent counts: only your latest upload per hotkey, and only if it passed the automated security scan (flagged agents are not evaluated until an admin clears them).
• Aggregation: each agent's score is the stake-weighted mean of all scoring validators:

$$\text{score}=\frac{\sum _i{\text{score}}_i\times {\text{stake}}_i}{\sum _i{\text{stake}}_i}$$

• Ties are broken by earliest upload time.
• Private phase: only hotkeys in the eligibility snapshot are ranked. Public phase: all submissions are ranked.

Review & Podium

During review, the admin team approves up to three podium places and a reward split for the tournament. The default split is 7 : 2 : 1:

Place	Default share of reward weight
1st	70%
2nd	20%
3rd	10%

• Tournaments can use a different split (for example 5 : 3 : 2, or 1st place only). The split is shown in the Reward allocation panel on each tournament page and cannot change once the podium is approved.
• If fewer places are approved, shares are renormalized — for example, two places under 7 : 2 : 1 receive 7/9 and 2/9.
• If no submission qualifies, the admin confirms no winner and the reward weight burns.

Weight Distribution

Validators set weights every 30 minutes as one combined vector across all active tournaments:

1. Preliminary leaders — 1% each. Every tournament that is not in its reward period gives a fixed 1% to its current rank-1 miner (from the public leaderboard during public evaluation, the private leaderboard otherwise), if that hotkey is in the metagraph.
2. Reward podium — the remainder. The tournament in its reward period splits the remaining weight (1 − 1% × number of leaders) across its podium UIDs according to the approved shares.
3. Burn — anything unresolved. With no active tournaments, no approved podium, or no podium hotkey in the metagraph, the remaining weight goes to UID 0 (burn).

Example — one tournament in reward with a 7 : 2 : 1 podium while another tournament is running:

Recipient	Weight
Other tournament's leader	1%
1st place	69.3%
2nd place	19.8%
3rd place	9.9%

Additional rules:

• If a podium hotkey is not in the metagraph when weights are set, it receives nothing and its share is redistributed across the remaining podium places.
• If the same UID holds several roles (e.g. leader of one tournament and podium in another), its weights are summed.
• Reward periods do not overlap by design. The only exception is a tournament with a confirmed no winner; if reward windows ever coincide, the earliest-starting tournament with an approved podium receives the remainder.
• Tournaments are processed in ID-sorted order so every validator produces identical vectors. Identical weight sets committed within 15 minutes are skipped.

The episodic podium structure is deliberate: rewards concentrate on a few verified top performers during a defined window rather than paying continuously, which reduces sell pressure and preserves alpha scarcity.

Miner Eligibility

• Your hotkey must be registered on Subnet 49 when you upload (the API rejects unregistered hotkeys) and you must upload during the contest or submit window.
• Emissions are paid on-chain to your hotkey's UID. Stay registered until your tournament's reward period ends — if your hotkey is deregistered, validators cannot assign weight to it and your share goes to the other podium places.

Platform Economics

Tournament rewards come from subnet emissions allocated through validator weights. Separately, the platform uses a TAO-denominated account balance for:

• Submission fees — a small, decaying per-upload fee that deters spam submissions
• Winner unlocks — optional purchases of approved podium agents when the tournament uses paid access

See Platform Balance & Fees for deposits, bonus tiers, and fee details.

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Subnet 49 (Nepher Robotics) — Robotics Tournament Subnet · Miner Guide · Validator Guide