accounts/{ss58}/positions publishes a confident zero over real ledger rows: unpriceable positions are silently dropped

[JSONbored]

/api/v1/accounts/{ss58}/positions publishes position_count: 0, total_stake_alpha: 0 and no
degraded block for coldkeys that demonstrably hold positions in the ledger it reads.

Evidence

Coldkey 5Df7xwEPkZm4itD3PfSzHsV9extvnQpTFBiNCSgBCJtxEP9e is literally the first row of
chain.nominator_positions:

coldkey  5Df7xwEPkZm4itD3PfSzHsV9extvnQpTFBiNCSgBCJtxEP9e
hotkey   5FyVinYphF6JS5FZHzhMQffxtgbz1WxwUEBAxTRo9nABwb5g
netuid   18   share_fraction 1   captured_at 1785634702670

The route returns:

{ "position_count": 0, "total_stake_alpha": 0, "positions": [] }

No degraded marker — so this reads as measured fact: "this account holds nothing."

Root cause

buildAccountPositions (src/account-nominator-positions.ts:162) prices each position off the live
D1 neurons table and silently drops any position it cannot price:

const hotkeyStake = stakeByKey.get(`${hotkey}|${netuid}`);
if (hotkeyStake == null) continue;

neurons is healthy and current (129 netuids, 30,085 rows, captured_at minutes old), but it holds
only currently-registered neurons, while chain.nominator_positions is a frozen export from
2026-08-02. Sampling 8 distinct hotkeys from the ledger, only 1 of 8 is present in neurons.
So most positions are dropped, and an account whose positions are all dropped reports a confident
zero.

The unavailableAccountPositions card exists to prevent exactly this — but it only fires when every
tier declines. Here a tier answered successfully; the loss happens per-position, below that check.

Secondary finding: the hot leg cannot fire

nominator_positions does not exist as a table in the production D1 database:

SELECT name FROM sqlite_master WHERE type='table' AND name LIKE '%position%'
-> account_position_daily        (only)

migrations/d1/0011_nominator_positions.sql was written but never applied (d1_migrations has 0
rows — the schema was clearly created outside that mechanism, so the whole migration ledger is
unreliable here, not just this entry). #9273's design says the hot leg's emptiness makes "the
cutover a property of the data, not of a deploy" — but a missing table is not an empty one, so the
route is pinned to the frozen export indefinitely.

The contract question this needs a decision on

Dropping unpriced positions may well be deliberate — #9066 explicitly removed the unpriced_*
escape hatches elsewhere. But a caller currently cannot distinguish:

• "this coldkey holds nothing", from
• "this coldkey holds positions we could not price".

Those are opposite answers and the payload gives them the same shape. Options, smallest first:

1. Mark the result degraded when any position was dropped for want of a price — reuses the
   existing degraded block, no schema change, and keeps fix(api): require the alpha price and drop the unpriced_* escape hatch #9066's no-unpriced-values rule intact.
   (Recommended.)
2. Report a dropped_position_count alongside the list.
3. Publish unpriced positions with a null stake_tao — contradicts fix(api): require the alpha price and drop the unpriced_* escape hatch #9066.

Acceptance

• A coldkey with ledger rows but no priceable positions is distinguishable from one that holds nothing
• The neurons-coverage shortfall is visible to the caller rather than silently absorbed
• Decide and document whether the D1 nominator_positions table should be created so the hot leg
  can ever take over, or whether fix(accounts): nominator_positions has no live refresh — /positions is frozen at the export and drifts forever #9273's lane is abandoned in favour of the export

[linear-code]

JSO-7282

[JSONbored]

Both halves are now resolved and verified in production.

The silent drop — fixed in #9306. A partially-priceable coldkey now declares it:

/accounts/5C4jr9gT…/positions
count 9 | total_stake_alpha 509531.099 | degraded.reason positions_unpriceable
first: { hotkey 5E2LP6…, netuid 55, share_fraction 0.136664, stake_tao 191682.91 }

That is the marker doing what it was built for — firing on any dropped row, not only an all-zero
result, because a partially-priced total understates the account just as silently and is harder to
notice.

The missing table and producer — resolved by #9292 (D1 table + write path + staleness watchdog)
and metagraphed-infra#243/#246 (the validator-nominators poller lane and its secret passthrough).
The lane's first successful run completed at 22:27 UTC today:

table	rows
nominator_positions	126,508
validator_nominator_counts	112,250

captured_at has advanced from the frozen 2026-08-02T01:38:22.670Z export to
2026-08-03T22:27:49.582Z, so the D1 hot leg is authoritative and the route is no longer pinned to
a snapshot that could never move.

One note for whoever reads this next: the lane reads its sync secrets once at run_loop entry
and returns permanently if they are absent, so a container started before a secret existed never
picks it up — the symptom is an empty table with no error. That is what delayed this; the recovery
was a container restart, not a code change.