The Subnet metagraph is a chart that displays a detailed readout of the neurons (validators & miners) on a subnet.

Metagraph key

• POS: Position in the chart (not a ranking)
• Shield/pickaxe:
  • The shield icon is shown for all validators.
  • A pickaxe is shown for miners. Orange miners are in immunity. (Note: new validators might initially have a pickaxe until weights are set.)
• UID: Unique ID: A number 0-{node count -1} that specifies the node the miner/validator is connecting on. Every miner or validator has a UID assigned to their registration.
• Name: The Hotkey name (if registered on the chain). Otherwise, the hotkey will be shown.
• Stake Weight: Stake weight is a measurement of the alpha staked on the subnet. Root stake is weighted at 18% of the tao staked.
  • Orange color: This validator has no parent hotkeys (see Parent/Child Hotkeys)
  • Yellow Color: Validators that are child hotkeys.
    • Child hotkeys have a carat that expands the metagraph to show all of the parent hotkeys and their contribution.
• VTrust: Validator Measurement of Validator trust. High Vtrust implies consensus on the weights being set by the validator.
• Consensus: Miners: A measurement of the consensus between the validators on the accuracy of the mining results. Adds to 1 for each subnet.
• Incentive: Miners: Represents the distribution of miner emissions. The emissions column adds to 1 for all miners in the subnet.
• Dividends Validators: Breakdown of emissions per validator. Calculated from the amount of TAO staked and the Vtrust. Adds to 1 for all validators in a subnet.
• Emission(P): Alpha granted each epoch (1 epoch is 360 blocks/72 minutes). (Note: The metagraph from Bittensor outputs emission in 1 billionth of an alpha per block. Same data, different units.).
• Updated
  • Validator: The number of blocks since weights were last set. This should be less than 500 for optimum performance, and anything over 1500 triggers an alert.
  • Miners This value has no meaning for miners.
• Axon: IP address.
• Hotkey: Hotkey of the neuron.
• Coldkey: Coldkey of the neuron.
• Root Stake: Amount of tao staked on root for the neuron (This is a sum of all parent/child hotkeys.)
• Root Weight: Tao on root * 18% (This is a sum of all parent/child hotkeys.)
• Alpha Stake amount of alpha staked. (This is a sum of all parent/child hotkeys.)
• Daily Alpha: Daily rewards estimate in alpha. (There are 20 epochs a day. This column is emission *20.)

Child hotkeys

If a validator on the subnet is a child hotkey for other validators to parent on, stake weight will be yellow and have a carat. On clicking the carat, the stake weight will be broken down by the child and all of the parent hotkeys:

On Subnet 75, the validator is Hippius. It has 7,748 alpha staked. It has two parents:

• Taostats: 30% of taostats stake is on this validator - this equates to 241k on root, and 56k alpha. The Stake Weight is calculated to 99k alpha
• tao.bot has 1% of its stake on this validator - 4k on root, and 43 alpha - for a total stake weight of 825.

The total stake weight is the sum of all three validators. In the taostats API, this is called the "family stake" (the sum of the parents and children.)

Reading the metagraph

There is a ton of information here. Here are a few tricks to read the metagraph:

Validator view

Columns of interest:

• Stake - The amount of tao delegated to the validator.
• VTrust: Vtrust describes how in consensus the validator's weights are.
• Dividends/Incentive: A percentage of validator & miner emissions that will be awarded to the neuron.
• Emission/Daily rewards: Tao emissions per epoch (and extrapolated to per day)
• Updated: The number of blocks since last setting weights to ensure your validator is functioning correctly. A validator that is not setting weights will drop in vtrust and emissions.

Sort by stake (or rank) descending to display validators at the top of the table.

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Some basic analysis points to help you better understand the data:

• Mining and validating: A single UID can run a miner and a validator. (Note: This pretty rare in modern Bittensor)
  • Position 7 (UID 224) is mining in addition to validation (there are nonzero Trust/Consensus/Incentive values.)
• Vtrust vs. Stake. Validator emissions are defined by the amount staked and the Vtrust determined by the Yuma Consensus. Generally, higher numbers of stake & vtrust correlate directly to higher emission
  • Vtrust effectPositions 8&9 have nearly identical stake values. Position 9 has a higher Vtrust (0.94 > 0.92). This leads to higher emissions (0.53 > 0.47.)
    • Vtrust is affected by how often weights are set (Updated lists the tao emitted since the last update.). Pe Position 8 has not updated weights on this network for 2657 (vs 298 for position 9), lowering their Vtrust score.
  • High stake/low Vtrust: Position 3 has ~ 40k more tao staked than position 4. Yet, it has lower Vtrust (0.91 vs 0.97). As a result, position 4 has slighty higher dividends and receives more emissions - despite the lower tao stake.

Miner View

Sort the metagraph by incentive. Your goal is to gain as much incentive as possible, as this directly correlates to emission. (You can sort by emission, but this will also add validators into the mix.)

• Set the number of entries to 100. We now see the bottom 100 nodes for emission (note, validators are here too - as they have 0 emission). Subtract away the validators, and the miners in immunity (gear icon), and the remaining miners are at risk of de-registration, as they have the lowest emission values.