Bittensor Weekly — October 16, 2026

The subnet went live as Verathos Decide on Thursday morning, from block 9,287,280. The ask is narrow and sharp: describe a situation, ask questions with fixed options, get a probability for each one, in a fraction of a second. Every answer arrives signed by the miner that produced it, so a decision can be traced to the machine that made it.

Four models serve from day one, including two new ones, d3-flash and d3-mini, that led the team's live benchmark. The API is public, signup comes with free credit, and the old keys stopped at the cut-over. A rebuilt subnet does not get to coast on its previous life.

The mechanism underneath is the part to watch. Up to 10% of SN96's emissions now goes to whoever brings paid demand, and no mining rig is required to earn it. That is the network's sharpest test yet on whether emissions can buy paying customers, run by a subnet that rebuilt itself around the question.

Beam (SN105) ran its security week on miner findings, and paid every reporter.

Six security holes closed in one sweep, all six found and reported by miners, each reporter handed an emissions bonus of +20% to +30%. One catch, days before the sweep, was the most expensive kind: a bug in the sale counter, where a staking app's fee transfer and the chain's unstake fee each got logged as a separate sale. Anyone selling through an app was billed for churn that never happened, and their frequency multiplier paid the price. UID 173 found it. The previous seven days of records were corrected for 50 hotkeys.

More fixes followed. Direct room messages now issue each member their own access token, closing a hole where one recipient could replace a message for the others (reported by UID 149, +5% emissions until October 22). Telemetry pricing fell by up to 25x, with standard reads at $0.50 per thousand and a new realtime tier, and the audit routes stay free.

Then there is the part no bounty covers: two miners spent Thursday doing forensic accounting in public. Lich_SL and mo0haned traced recovery chunks in room transfers landing on a single UID across every sample they pulled, disagreed with each other about why, corrected each other in the thread, and handed the pattern to the team. "We will investigate the room assignment," came the reply. This is what a subnet looks like when its miners act like an audit department it never had to hire.

Hippius (SN75) went from selling disk space to selling sealed machines.

Confidential computing went live: miners now serve confidential VMs, machines whose memory stays sealed even from the host running them, on AMD's SEV-SNP. Disk keys release only to a VM that proves, with a processor-signed report, that it runs software the team approved. Storage was the warm-up; secrets are the bigger market.

Two products in one week. A screen recorder landed mid-week, up to 4K with mic and system audio, and every clip is encrypted on your own device before it reaches your own drive. The pricing story is louder: the team's comparison puts SN75 ahead of AWS, Google Cloud, R2, Wasabi and Backblaze on price at every size tested. Bold chart for a subnet that started as commodity disk.

Hot. 958 messages across 74 channels on Thursday, up from 841 across 71 the week before. ORO (SN15) led volume at 130 messages over the closing two days, Score (SN44) followed at 90, then RedTeam (SN61) at 62, Enigma (SN63) at 61, Connito (SN102) at 54 and Beam (SN105) at 51. Verathos (SN96) opened its doors to miners overnight, and Cortex (SN100) went from a frozen validator to a fresh weight vector in a day.

Building. Cortex (SN100) put 70% of its emissions on HyperTrain, the challenge where miners train one model together (first target: OpenDecision, from scratch), and put Cortex Mobile into alpha on TestFlight. Affine (SN120) swapped its base model to Xiaomi's MiMo-V2.6 mid-run, task groups going 42 to 138 in two epochs, then took the registration burn to zero: a proof-of-work check registers an unfunded hotkey, tested end to end at 0 TAO. OpenRoboto (SN80) put peaqOS on its data collectors, 30 devices live with machine identities anchored on Solana, and kept champion snapshots public 24 hours after every crown. Umi (SN78) closed cohort 5 with 14 public models across 196 endpoints, nine beating the frozen baseline. MVTRX (SN79) shipped 0.6.4 to testnet with mainnet today. Conjectures (SN66) wrapped DEFLATE: 648 proved parsers, 7,681 alpha paid, and every new submission now needs the chat logs behind its proof. Almanac (SN41) earned a Metaculus medal in its first public forecasting run, the only bot of 136 to call one question right, and published the full breakdown including the misses. ReadyAI (SN33) routes 75% of its API revenue into alpha buybacks, and its same-job test showed a $0.047-per-page model with one SN33 skill beating a $1.23-per-page frontier model. Instant (SN46) switched its burn off and joined Architect's inference router. SayGM (SN28) traced failed attestations to a Phala test node and got 19 workers running on the new version. Ditto (SN118) reset its burn from 100% to 70% after miners pushed. TPN (SN65) opened TPN-006 with a tighter 8GiB ceiling and is building a second scoring method on KL divergence. Targon (SN4) said its buyback alpha gets burned once taxes clear, with a revenue dashboard landing imminently. Tag101 (SN101) shipped SignalFeed, turning its tagged posts into trend signals. Quantum Compute (SN48) said mining is moving to QPU cloud providers, retiring the "own a quantum computer" requirement. Data Universe (SN13) merged the fix for the Reddit false-failure bug, and Cacheon (SN14) opened its DeepSeek arena with the subnet's full weight behind it. Forge said it is partnering with tao.com to let holders borrow against staked alpha instead of selling it, and 404-GEN (SN17) opened early testing for the next phase of its 3JS competition.

Cold. Same shape as most weeks: a dozen teams carried the news and the rest of the map watched. Subnet 86, the slot nobody ever claimed, was deregistered outright.

Friction. Yanez (SN54) pushed its Execution phase and the UAV reward payout to October 19 while it finishes scoring about 2 million submissions; the team took the complaints straight and apologized (see the Human Moment). Enigma (SN63) declined a runner-up prize for its last quantum challenge, explaining the earlier runner-up payout was a one-time move to open-source a materially different solution. And a newcomer's complaint about SN33's incentive concentration got a patient answer: multiple UIDs are allowed, and nobody has to be first to keep a slot, just not last.

Yanez's channel spent the week asking where the payouts were. Fair ask: the cycle was due, then overdue, and the new date slid once more while roughly 2 million submissions sit in scoring. Then Asem from the team answered without spin.

"If you mean the miners, they're right to ask. Rewards matter, and we should have communicated the delay sooner. I own that."

He added the line most teams skip: "We can own a late update and still insist on getting the scoring right."

That is the trade running through a lot of these channels: miners wait, teams grind through duplicate checks and exploitation reviews so the honest submissions get paid what they earned, and the trust holds as long as somebody says the hard part out loud. Phase 5 opens October 19, and the UAV rewards go out with it.

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