How it works

For every dollar Stack sends to holders out of its fees, it puts a dollar into a Bittensor subnet. Everything that subnet earns is then sent to holders on top. That is the whole design. The rest of this page is how each part is carried out.

It starts with the fees. Every $STACK trade pays one, and the keeper swaps it for TAO. 50% of that is sent to holders. 50% crosses to Bittensor and is staked into one subnet, held under our own key.

The subnet then earns rewards of its own. All of them are unstaked, bridged back to Solana and sent to holders. None are kept and none are sold.

So far holders have been sent 8.85 TAO ($2.68K) out of the fees, against 8.8 TAO ($2.66K) put into subnets, and 0 TAO more that the subnet earned.

Holders are paid in wrapped TAO: TAO as it exists on Solana, the token at mint taoC6xyv2v8tDLcev4uaGUgV4vdQsWJrGft2kcBRrBY, which the bridge redeems one for one on Bittensor. It arrives in the wallet that holds the $STACK.

A Bittensor subnet is a market for one kind of digital work. Miners do the work. Validators score it and set the weights that decide who gets paid. The owner registered the subnet, sets its hyperparameters, and receives a fixed cut of what it earns. Ownership is one storage entry on chain, SubnetOwner[netuid] = coldkey, and section 7 is about the four ways that entry gets rewritten.

Every emitting subnet issues one alpha per block to its participants, 7,200 alpha a day. The split is fixed in the runtime: 18% to the owner, 41% to miners, 41% to validators and the stakers behind them. Separately, the network injects TAO into each subnet's pool in proportion to its price share, and that TAO is what the alpha is backed by. Block emission has been 0.5 TAO since the December 2025 halving, about 3,600 TAO a day across the network. The chain is at block 9,176,426 as this page renders.

Each subnet has its own token, alpha, and a pool that pairs it with TAO. Staking into a subnet means swapping TAO for alpha in that pool. Unstaking swaps back. The price is the pool ratio, so every stake moves it, and a large one moves it a lot. That is slippage, and it is why the treasury enters and leaves positions in tranches.

Rewards accrue into the position every tempo, 360 blocks or about 72 minutes, as newly minted alpha credited to the stake. There is no unbonding period; a position can be unstaked at any time at the pool price. The pool charges a 0.05% fee on each swap.

Alpha is a staking asset, not a share. Holding a lot of it gives no vote, no control over hyperparameters and no say over the owner cut. Size does give proportional levers: validator stake weight, a pro-rata claim on the pool's TAO if the subnet is dissolved, and influence on the price that sets the subnet's emission share. The one threshold right is the conviction takeover in section 7.

1. Fee claim on Solana. Every $STACK trade pays a fee. The keeper claims it into the treasury wallet.
2. Buy canonical TAO on Jupiter. The fee SOL is swapped for the canonical TAO mint on Solana, taoC6xyv2v8tDLcev4uaGUgV4vdQsWJrGft2kcBRrBY. 50% of it stays on Solana to be sent to holders, as section 6 describes. 50% goes on.
3. Bridge with LayerZero OFT. The subnet's share is sent over the LayerZero OFT bridge to the keeper's transit account on the Bittensor EVM, where it arrives as wTAO.
4. Unwrap. wTAO is unwrapped into native TAO on the same account.
5. Stake through the precompile. From the transit account the keeper calls the staking precompile at 0x805, addStake(hotkey, amount, netuid). The chain swaps the TAO for alpha on that subnet and credits the position to our coldkey, delegated to the chosen validator hotkey.

The position sits under our own coldkey. Not the bridge, not a custodian, not a validator. The keeper caps each swap at 1% slippage and splits anything larger into tranches.

Rewards are newly minted alpha. Each tempo the subnet mints its emission and pays the 41% validator share to the validators in proportion to the stake behind them. A validator keeps its take, a percentage it sets, and the rest lands in the delegated positions as more alpha. That is the only source of rewards before ownership. Nothing is sold to anyone to produce them.

The keeper harvests every day , and only when the reward portion of a position is worth at least 0.5 TAO . Smaller amounts stay staked until they are. Everything harvested is sent to holders.

Rewards are not revenue. They are inflation in a token whose price is set by a pool, and the pool can move faster than the rewards arrive. A subnet can pay a high reward rate in alpha while its alpha loses more value in TAO than the rewards add. The treasury bears that on every position.

Holders are paid in wrapped TAO, from two streams. The first is their share of every fee, 50% , bought on Solana as the fees are claimed. The second is everything the subnet earns: the reward portion of the position is unstaked in tranches, wrapped to wTAO and bridged back to Solana over the same OFT. Nothing is sold along the way.

The TAO is sent to holders every 4 minutes . Each wallet receives a share of the round in proportion to the $STACK it holds at that moment. More $STACK, more of the round. Nothing is burned. Holdings below 10,000 $STACK receive nothing in that round. Pools, the treasury and team wallets never receive: 8CjdHd…pjCPNb.

A distribution is whatever the fees bought and the subnet earned, split by holding. If nothing came in, nothing is sent.

Ownership is one storage entry. Four paths rewrite it. The keeper is configured for the one marked, and reports its target as SN75 (Hippius) .

1. A. Register a new subnet.

   Call register_network, then start_call. The cost is the dynamic lock cost, right now 1,026 TAO ($310.35K) . It doubles the instant someone registers and decays linearly back over about eight days, to the floor after about sixteen. Registrations are limited network-wide to one every 14,400 blocks, about two days. The lock is paid into the new subnet's TAO pool, is not refundable and is not burned, and since May 2026 the registrant receives no alpha for it. The network is at its cap, so every registration prunes the non-immune subnet with the lowest moving price; today that would be SN113 . New subnets start with emissions off until root enables them.

2. B. Buy an existing subnet.

   There is no set-owner extrinsic. The seller runs announce_coldkey_swap with a hash of the buyer's coldkey, waits 36,000 blocks, five days, with the seller's coldkey frozen, then completes the swap. Everything the coldkey controls moves: balance, stake, locks, hotkeys and every subnet it owns. Payment is off-chain. There is no escrow. The only public price we found is a subnet bought for 200 TAO in May 2025.

3. C. Conviction takeover.Which we use

   Alpha staked on a subnet can be locked toward a hotkey. Locked alpha keeps earning and cannot be unstaked below the lock floor. Locking builds conviction over time; on current parameters it takes about 43 days to mature and about 130 days to unlock. At the end of every epoch the chain checks each subnet that is at least one year old, 2,629,800 blocks. If the hotkey with the most conviction holds more than 18% of the subnet's eligible alpha, where eligible alpha is the alpha outside the pool minus protocol-held and burned alpha, ownership moves to that hotkey's coldkey. No vote, no claim extrinsic. Only alpha locked to a single hotkey counts, so a coalition locks toward the same one. The incumbent defends by holding more conviction.

   Our target is 565 days old, past the one-year gate . Its alpha trades at 0.0165 TAO ($4.98) per alpha . Progress is measured as our locked alpha over approximately the subnet's alpha outside the pool, against the 18% line; the column on the analytics page shows it live.

4. D. Crowdloan lease.

   A crowdloan pays the lock cost, a beneficiary operates the subnet through a proxy, and ownership transfers when the lease ends. Contributors receive a share of the owner cut in TAO, not ownership.

What the owner receives. 18% of the subnet's alpha emission every tempo, paid as staked alpha on the owner hotkey: 1,296 alpha a day for an emitting subnet, which at today's price is 21.33 TAO ($6.45K) a day . Turning that into TAO means selling into the pool, with the 0.05% fee and slippage. Owners also set the subnet's hyperparameters and may run a validator on the owner hotkey.

Holding the token is not owning the subnet. Locking more than 18% of it for a year is. No takeover has completed on mainnet yet.

What can go wrong. The target can be pruned: each registration dissolves the lowest-priced non-immune subnet, holders are paid pro-rata from the pool's TAO at below-spot value, and conviction locks are deleted without compensation. The incumbent can out-lock us. Root can disable a subnet's emissions or dissolve it. Governance can change the threshold.

The half that goes into subnets buys one subnet at a time. The rule is set in the keeper's configuration and read from it here: One subnet at a time: the one reporting the most revenue whose takeover the fees can pay for. Every fee buys it until it is ours, then the next is chosen the same way. The choice is reviewed every 30 days .

Fees split across several subnets would leave every position short of the 18% line. Fees put into one get there sooner. The cost is concentration: until the subnet is ours, the treasury rises and falls with it alone.

Most revenue. Subnets report what they earn to subnet.ai. The figures are self-reported and most subnets report none. The current target reports $144.00K a year .

Within reach. A takeover needs 18% of the subnet's alpha outside the pool, bought at the pool price, and the price rises as we buy. A subnet is within reach when the fees can pay for that. The largest subnets report the most revenue and cost the most to take over, so the rule picks the best one the treasury can finish. What the rest of the target costs today is on the analytics page.

Every swap is capped at 1% slippage and split into tranches beyond that. When the target is ours, the owner cut starts to arrive and the next subnet is chosen the same way. What each cycle did is in the epochs table on the activity page.

Three keys hold everything. Open them on the explorers and compare what you see with what this site says.

Solana treasury wallet

8CjdHdk7xrtM15EptWqQgZQnPXK926C19fVdXypjCPNb

On Solscan, every fee claim, every TAO purchase and every distribution to holders is a transaction from this wallet.

Bittensor coldkey

5EHhAAZ78nBfkh1z2MD21XwaktAMumEK7m7okxNKFQTyc9fR

On taostats, the stake under this coldkey should match the position on the analytics page, and the locked amount on the target should match the takeover figures.

Bittensor EVM transit account

0x120118dd65A222aaeAEdD8654AFb63201b26465e

Bridged TAO arrives here before it is staked. It should not accumulate; compare the balance with the ledger's bridge and stake rows.

The activity page lists every keeper action with the signature or extrinsic hash that produced it, and the epochs table shows what each cycle did. Registration cost, the prune candidate and alpha prices are read from a Bittensor node with subnetInfo_getLockCost, subnetInfo_getSubnetToPrune and swap_currentAlphaPriceAll. Pools, supply and emission share come from backprop.finance; USD prices from Jupiter; the revenue figures from subnet.ai, whose prices we never show.