Emissions: Root vs. Alpha Stake
How we got here:
In the Bittensor ecosystem, holders of tao may stake to a validator in a subnet in two different ways:
- Root stake : Staking to a validator in subnet 0, the root subnet.
- Alpha Stake: Staking to a validator in a subnet, exchanging your tao for alpha token.
The ratio of root: alpha staked is calculated using the root_proportion
.
Calculating root proportion
root proportion
is calculated from 3 values:
- tao on root: The total amount of tao on root.
- alpha issued: The sum of
alpha_in
andalpha_out
(all alpha emitted) - tao_weight: a variable set by the chain. The current
tao_weight
is 0.18.
Root proportion will change every block, as the tao and alpha values will have increased (by 1 and 2 respectively). The results can be charted over time:

On day 0 there is 6M tao available.
The chart will vary on the amount of tao available at the moment the subnet is created. The above chart shows day 0 = 6 million tao.
On day 0 of the subnet, 100% of emission will go to root stakeholders.
50% root: 50% alpha is met at approximately day 70 (this is highly variable, and just an estimate).
In this second chart, the yellow/green subnet is created 100 days after the blue/red subnet (9,720,000 tao, and 0 alpha for the 2nd subnet):

Next steps
Now that the stake has been divided into root and subnet shares, we can divide these amongst the stakeholders.
Updated 14 days ago