Bittensor's v440 quality gate — live for about ten days now — is the change that lets the top tier of subnets keep their emission while the long tail gets choked by a steep curve, recalculated every 360 blocks. One holder ran the numbers and got $45M of emission pulled out of smaller subnets, with $27M of it landing in the top four. It's a soft threshold around the 61st percentile, so roughly 32 subnets keep the bulk of the money and everyone below fights over what's left. The counter-proposal, PR #3013, is sitting open asking to widen the gate to 64. The first weeks under the live gate have made the adjustment real — emissions are rebalancing in the open, and the argument over where the cutoff should sit is still running.
The other half of the ledger moved harder. A full-chain census this week counted roughly 60 of 128 subnets now running 0% burn — miners keep every token the chain pays out. RedTeam deleted alpha burn from its code. 404-GEN declared itself a 0% burn subnet. SOMA went from 98.6% burn to zero. The logic writes itself: if the chain might cut what you receive, the one lever you still control is how much of it reaches your miners.
And in the root channel the debate sharpened past the gate itself, into the plumbing underneath — the "dinosaur pools" where heavy liquidity locks a top price in place so a good subnet can't reprice even when the market wants it to. One proposal routes emissions off a conviction-based gate, reading how much capital a team has irreversibly frozen, reusing the yardstick subtensor already computes. Cheap to launch is looking like the easy part. Brutal to earn is the new rule of the road.
Subnet Spotlight — Conjectures (SN66)
Bittensor is about to pay people to solve math problems nobody has cracked, and the chain can't stop talking about it.
SN66, relaunching as Conjectures.io, is days from shipping its pivot. It's dropping "harness development" and now miners run LLM agent loops that produce formal proofs of open mathematical problems, verified in Lean. The dev Discord lit up with 70+ reacts, the busiest thread on the chain this week. One contributor is already claiming a 20+ year old open problem, solved "using the assistance of codex and claude."
The part worth holding is the verification story, straight from the team's own mouth:
"A miner submits a formal proof, and the validator checks that it proves the exact committed statement under the permitted axioms and is accepted by Lean's kernel. The proof itself is the answer... Open-ended search can absorb enormous compute, while success can still be identified with extraordinary precision."
That's the clean pitch. The proof compiles or it doesn't — no human referee, binary yes or no. Math fits a mining network oddly well: it's open-ended enough to print compute, and strict enough that a machine decides who's right. "Solving one of these problems would be the biggest thing Bittensor has ever seen," one dev said in the channel. The bet is that frontier research belongs in an incentive network, and if it works, the first subnets that reward genuinely unsolved questions will look nothing like the leaderboard grinders.
Subnet Spotlight — Minos (SN107)
A quiet genomics subnet made OpenAI write about it this week.
Minos walked into its channel proud: a case study on HelixForge — the synthetic-genome pipeline its miners have been feeding since May — published with OpenAI. Enterprise access drops soon at studio.theminos.ai. One miner put the mood in a single line: "you went from last to top 20, which melts my brain."
That's the part worth holding. A subnet nobody watched, grinding variant-calling configs for months, now a name a company will cite in a case study. This is what mining is supposed to feel like.
Sentiment Roundup
Hot:
Conjectures (SN66) — biggest buzz on the chain, launch expected any day now.
Minos (SN107) — the OpenAI case study landed and the channel glowed.
Nodexo (SN106) — cut on-demand GPU prices overnight after miners kept saying the subnet needs renters, not more GPUs. An RTX 4090 now runs $0.31 an hour, an A6000 $0.30. A marketplace that re-prices around what its miners asked for.
KubeTEE (SN90) — open-sourced its full TEE stack and put free models (kimi-k3, glm-5.2, deepseek-v4-flash) live, auditable by anyone.
InfiniteQuant (SN89) — launched Closers, letting miners call HOLD or CLOSE on any open position and get graded an hour later.
Phylax (SN76) — closed its first submission round and started paying winners.
Under pressure:
Quasar (SN24) — resolved, and not the way the weekend left it. The audit that dragged all week (weights opened: 16.26B params inherited, 298M new — 1.8% original, per the public notebook) came to a head when the team tried to play it again. Const found out and ousted them. Today the channel reads "old scam team officially out," the owner is banned from the server, mining is off ("no mining right now you need to wait for a new team to arrive here"), and a coldkey swap is announced. One reminder floating through the room: "Don't fade a subnet owned by Const." The subnet isn't gone — it's waiting on whoever steps in next.
TrajectoryRL (SN11) — miners cracked open a scoring mess: one submission, same epoch, scored 1.00 by one validator and 0.11 by two others, with a fourth caught scoring runs the LLM never billed for.
glyph (SN117) — the "deregistration anxiety" turned out to be the least of it: the team admitted a July 30 OTC fraud. Roughly 3,479.53 TAO moved through several wallets toward exchange-linked accounts after counterparties took the GLYPH alpha and never paid. The team's own words: "we believe this was an intentional and prepared fraud," and "we proceeded without independent escrow. That should never have happened." A full on-chain incident report went public, and community skeptics were reminded the pseudo-investigation rode the word of the same owner. The subnet is "teetering on the edge of danger," in one miner's phrasing.
Harnyx (SN67) — its anti-copy tool got strict enough that the current champion can't reuse their own winning code without tripping a "near duplicate" penalty. Original miners walked, the reg fee fell to near zero. The team pushed novelty rewards up in response.
Engy (SN53) — anti-cheat escalated from docking liars to outright bans, and the pushback asked the harder question: who checks the checker.
Building quietly:
Ditto (SN118) — the "Ditto is the fastest & friendliest AI" pitch collided with a community backlash against advisor Seby. One miner, bluntly: "He just took a 180 on a project hes been hyping for a year and sat on it getting alpha tokens with no revenue nor productivity. Ditto been going downhill ever since he «lost» 1 million dollar." Calls to "leave Seby and get support/guidance elsewhere" mixed with defenses about his "passion for Bittensor." Meanwhile the benchmark-v8 rollout and its post-mortem moved ahead.
Cascade (SN91) — fixed its scoring metric, re-scored the round, crowned a new king (uid 22), and is moving to a 12-hour cadence.
Swarm (SN124) — open-sourced its Interceptor reference model; its eval teams claim roughly 120x faster evaluations since the start.
ChronoLLM (SN38) — crawled from 0 active miners in late July to 10, minting time-locked LLMs with a 0% burn.
Numbers That Matter
~60 of 128 subnets now at 0% burn — miners keep everything.
$45M of emission pulled from small subnets in the v440 model; $27M landing in the top four.
1,567 messages in SN24's channel in ~25 hours during the Quasar audit meltdown — while 46 of 131 tracked subnet channels logged zero messages all week. Attention on this chain is concentrated far harder than emission is.
$0.31/hr for an RTX 4090 on Nodexo after the price cut.
0 → 10 active miners on ChronoLLM, minting 13 models, one per year 2013–2025.
90 sandboxed executions per entry in Phylax's first round (30 skill artifacts × 3 runs); top agent scored 0.530.
~τ41/day averaged across just 4 emission slots on Affine (SN120), one of the fattest per-slot rates on the chain.
Notable Quotes
"old scam team officially out." — a Quasar channel regular, as SN24 changes hands after Const ousted the team
"Don't fade a subnet owned by Const." — community member on SN24, about why they'd stay in the channel past the ousting
"Proud to let you all know that we just published a case study with OpenAI on HelixForge and the synthetic genomes that you are all working on. thank you for your hard work!" — Minos team, to its miners
"thanks for the advice and for looking out for us, man. really appreciate it." — a glyph miner, to the owner answering questions mid-business-trip
"I made the mistake of trying to harden the docker configuration this release." — a Ditto dev, typed into the public channel during its rollout
"the incentive mechanism is working. We're getting an adequate number of GIFs now." — Cascade's team, about a subnet whose whole job is picking a mascot gif
Human Moment
The story that doesn't fit a headline is Minos.
For months this was a nobody subnet, quietly feeding synthetic-genome data into HelixForge while no one watched and no one cheered. Then the team published a case study with OpenAI, and the pride in that channel was something you could feel. One miner nailed it better than any press release: "you went from last to top 20, which melts my brain."
That's the part of mining that's easy to lose sight of — the slow grind nobody applauds, then one morning the wider industry is citing your work. The team's response was just as human in its way: thank you for your hard work. Sometimes the quiet ones are the ones doing it right.
Coming Up
Conjectures (SN66) — launch "still expected this week." The one to watch, and this time perhaps for years.
Nodexo (SN106) — onboarding is being revamped for transparency after miners reported long queues with zero probe requests.
Poker44 (SN126) — burn, at 90% while validators upgrade, comes off within 24–48 hours if the rollout stays clean; its encrypted axon protection is already live.
Cascade (SN91) — next rounds move to a 12-hour cadence to see how the new scoring holds up.
Swarm (SN124) — a second validator (uid 177) is live to speed the eval bottleneck, and it's still optimizing.
Phylax (SN76) — the next round opens daily at 12:00 PM EST.
Minos (SN107) — enterprise access opens soon at studio.theminos.ai.
That's the week, folks! See you in the next one :)