Every block, 1 tao is emitted by the chain (until 10.5M blocks are emitted and the first Halving occurs). Where do these blocks go?

The tao is divided amongst the subnets and the fraction of tao awarded to each subnet is placed into the tao_in of the Subnet Pools.

Flow based emission

Starting in November 2025, tao flow will begin to be a part of the tao emission equation. By December 2025, 100% of tao emitted will be based on tao flow.

What is flow

In every subnet, tao flows in and out of the liquidity pool through staking actions:

Flow is only staking it is NOT based on emission, root proportion or neuron registration.

To smooth this equation, each subnet's flow is placed in an exponential moving average with a half life of 30 days:

Now this flow can still be negative- and we cannot have a negative flow (removing tao from the subnet), so we only use flow EMAs that are. above zero.. and those below zero are set to zero.

We can then normalize the flows across all subnets:

📘

Note: this is the default tao_in. The actual tao in may be smaller than this due to Tao Excess. This occurs when price and default tao emission result in "too much" alpha_in injected into the pool.

The alpha_in is scaled to it's maximum emission, which results in scaling down the tao_in. The difference is called excess tao.