Platform Balance & Fees

Every Nepher account has a platform balance denominated in TAO. It is used for two things:

• Tournament submission fees — charged on each agent upload
• Winner unlocks — paying to download approved podium agents from tournaments with paid access

You fund the balance by sending TAO on-chain from your registered coldkey to the Nepher treasury. Manage everything on nepher.ai/account/billing (Account → Billing) or check it from the terminal with npcli account balance.

Deposits are one-way

There are no withdrawals. The platform balance can only be spent on submission fees and winner unlocks, so deposit only what you plan to use.

1. Register Your Coldkey

Deposits are matched to your account by sender coldkey. Transfers from any other address are ignored and cannot be credited.

1. Create an API key at nepher.ai/account/api-keys. If you restrict platforms, the key must include Hackathon access (required by the coldkey registration endpoint).

2. Install the CLI and wallet signer:

   pip install nepher-cli bittensor-wallet

3. Register the coldkey (signing happens locally — your keys never leave your machine):

   npcli account register-coldkey --wallet <wallet_name> --api-key nepher_xxxxxxxx

Rules:

• One coldkey per account. Re-running with a different wallet replaces your registered coldkey.
• A coldkey can belong to only one Nepher account — registering a coldkey that is already bound elsewhere fails with "This coldkey is already registered to another account".

2. Deposit TAO

On Account → Billing, the Deposit TAO panel shows the treasury address, your registered coldkey, and the network (finney).

1. Send native TAO (a standard balance transfer — not alpha) from your registered coldkey to the treasury address shown on the Billing page.
2. Wait for the transfer to reach 3 block confirmations.
3. The deposit is credited automatically by a background indexer, usually within a minute. You can also credit it yourself:
   • Refresh recent — scans the last ~48 finalized blocks (about 10 minutes) for transfers from your coldkey.
   • Check & top up — claim a specific transfer by its extrinsic ID in block-index form, e.g. 9092713-0006 (copy it from a block explorer). Transaction hashes are not accepted.

Rule	Value
Asset	TAO (native transfer)
Network	Bittensor finney
Confirmations	3 blocks
Minimum per transfer	0.01 TAO
Maximum per transfer	10,000 TAO
Crediting	Each extrinsic is credited once; claiming it again returns "Already credited"

Transfers below the minimum or above the maximum are not credited and are not refunded automatically — contact the team on Discord if this happens.

Deposit Bonus

Larger single transfers receive a bonus that is credited automatically together with the deposit:

Single transfer	Multiplier	You send	You get
Under 10 TAO	×1	5 TAO	5 TAO
10 TAO or more	×1.5	10 TAO	15 TAO
20 TAO or more	×2	20 TAO	40 TAO
50 TAO or more	×3	50 TAO	150 TAO

• The bonus applies per transfer; the highest tier reached is used.
• Separate smaller transfers are not combined — two 5 TAO transfers do not reach the 10 TAO tier.
• The bonus appears as a separate Deposit bonus row in your history.

Tier thresholds are set by the platform and may change; the Billing page always shows the current tiers.

3. Submission Fees

Each tournament agent upload is charged from your platform balance. The fee is designed to discourage spam re-submissions while keeping thoughtful iteration cheap.

• First submission in a tournament costs the minimum fee.
• Right after each submission, your next fee jumps to the maximum, then decays exponentially back toward the minimum.

$$\text{fee}(t)=\text{max}+(\text{min}-\text{max})\cdot (1-e^{-3t/T})$$

where (t) is the time since your last successful upload in that tournament and (T) is the decay window. The fee is about 95% of the way back to the minimum after one window.

Current defaults (live values are shown on nepher.ai/tournament/submission-cost):

Setting	Default
Minimum fee	0.1 TAO
Maximum fee	0.5 TAO
Decay window	6 hours

Time since your last upload	Next fee
First upload in the tournament	0.1 TAO
Immediately	0.5 TAO
1 hour	~0.343 TAO
2 hours	~0.247 TAO
3 hours	~0.189 TAO
6 hours	~0.120 TAO
12 hours	~0.101 TAO

How charging works:

1. Before the upload, your balance is checked. If it is too low, the upload is rejected with HTTP 402: "Insufficient platform balance for submission fee (X TAO). Deposit TAO on Account → Billing, then try again."
2. The fee is debited only after the archive is stored successfully. Security-scan or upload failures are not charged.
3. If the agent record cannot be saved after charging, the fee is refunded automatically.
4. Deleting an agent later does not refund its fee.

The same curve applies to website uploads and npcli tournament submit. The CLI prints the fee before uploading and the amount charged afterwards. If fees are disabled by the platform, uploads are free.

4. Winner Unlocks

After review, each tournament's approved podium agents have an access mode set by the admin team:

Mode	Who can download
Private (default)	Only the agent owner and admins
Public	Any signed-in user
Paid	Anyone who unlocks it — each podium place has its own price (0.0001–10,000 TAO)

To unlock a paid agent, open the tournament on nepher.ai/tournament and click Unlock for X TAO. The price is charged from your platform balance and the download is unlocked permanently on your account, even if the access mode changes later.

5. History

The History table on the Billing page (and npcli account ledger) lists every balance change:

Type	Meaning
Deposit	TAO received from your coldkey
Deposit bonus	Bonus credited with a qualifying deposit
Submission fee	Tournament upload fee
Unlock	Winner download purchase
Adjustment	Manual correction or automatic refund

npcli account balance            # balance, registered coldkey, network
npcli account ledger --limit 50  # recent billing history

Related

• Incentive Mechanism — how tournament rewards are distributed
• Miner Guide — full submission workflow
• Nepher CLI — npcli account commands