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Merit Subnet — Whitepaper

1. Believe

Merit is a Bittensor subnet designed to reward miners for their active participation across other Bittensor subnets.

Validators in Merit evaluate registered hotkeys based on their contribution elsewhere in the Bittensor ecosystem, assigning dynamic rewards based on a calculated Bittensor Miner Participation Score (BMPS).

Merit encourages real work, broad participation, and sustained online presence.

2. Registration

Miners must register their hotkey directly to the Merit subnet (netuid 73).

  • Registration happens on-chain following Bittensor standards.
  • Only hotkeys registered to Merit will be evaluated and scored.

3. Incentive Mechanism (Finalized)

Merit's validator scoring process operates as follows:

Step 1: Global Refresh Each Epoch

  • Validators call subtensor.get_all_metagraphs_info() once per epoch.
  • Only active subnets are considered.
  • Netuid 0 (root) and Netuid 73 (Merit) are excluded.

Step 2: 1:1 Hotkey Lookup

For each hotkey registered on Merit:

  • Validator searches for the same hotkey across all other active subnets.
  • If found, collects the hotkey's incentive from that subnet.

Step 3: Incentive Averaging

  • Validators sum all incentives found across all other subnets.
  • Average incentive is calculated by:
average_incentive = (sum of found incentives) / (total number of active subnets - 2)

Where:

  • Active subnets exclude netuid 0 and 73.
  • Missing entries are treated as zero.

✅ This design rewards broad multi-subnet participation.

Step 4: BMPS Score Calculation

The Bittensor Miner Participation Score (BMPS) is:

bmps = average_incentive × 100,000

Then adjusted for liveness:

Event Effect on BMPS
Failed ping (after retries) bmps == 0.0

✅ Ping acts as a small fine-tuning adjustment,
✅ Incentives remain the dominant factor.

Step 5: Normalization and Submission

  • All BMPS scores are normalized across registered miners.
  • Weights are submitted via set_weights() to the Bittensor chain.

4. Security and Verification

  • Public IPv4 Address Validation ensures only reachable miners are scored.
  • TOTP-Secured Pings verify real miner presence using hotkey-seeded secrets.
  • Type-Checked Responses protect against invalid or garbage returns.
  • Background Health Checks record miner uptime over time.

5. Anti-Gaming Measures

Threat Mitigation
Registering a single subnet to maximize reward ✅ Averaging across all subnets
Faking responses ✅ TOTP cryptographic verification
Hosting on invalid IPs ✅ Public IPv4 validation
Ghost miners registering but never serving ✅ Live ping penalties

6. Technical Parameters

Parameter Value
Subnet UID (Merit) 73
Epoch Tempo 360 blocks (~1 hour)
Ping Timeout 10 seconds
Ping Retries 2
Ping Failure Penalty bmps == 0.0
Max Validators 64
Max Stored Epoch Files 48
Default Network finney

7. Future Extensions

  • Merit Dashboard to track miner performance live.
  • Subnet Popularity and Complexity Index for scaling BMPS.
  • Dynamic Liveness Models based on uptime history.

📋 Summary

Merit creates a decentralized, incentive-driven system where miners are rewarded fairly based on their broad, real-world contribution to the Bittensor ecosystem.

✅ Validators refresh incentives dynamically.
✅ Miners are evaluated per hotkey, per subnet.
✅ Uptime and participation both matter — but contribution comes first.

Merit rewards real work, not empty registrations.