ConceptsDynamic TAO Ecosystem

Dynamic TAO Ecosystem

Mechanisms introduced with the economic decentralization of subnets. Learn how the distributed consensus and incentive systems work.

Dynamic TAO (also called "dTAO") brings a major change to how staking works in Bittensor. In the old system, you would simply pick a validator and stake your TAO with them. The validator would then decide which subnets to support with your stake, and you had no say in this choice.

Now, you have direct control. When you stake TAO, you choose which subnet (of the ones your validator is registered at) you want to stake to. Your TAO gets then exchanged with that subnet's tokens. These tokens show your support for the subnet and let you earn rewards from its success.

REFERING TO SUBNET TOKENS AS ALPHA

Each subnet has its own token (ALPHA for subnet 1, BETA for subnet 2, etc.). For simplicity, we will always refer to all subnet tokens as "ALPHA".

How It Changes Staking

The new staking system works through subnet tokens. When you stake TAO to a subnet, two things happen:

  1. Your TAO goes into that subnet's pool. The pool holds all staked TAO and subnet tokens. The amount of subnet tokens you get depends on how much TAO and how many subnet tokens are in the pool at that moment.
  2. Your stake helps decide how many of the emissions the subnet gets. The more TAO staked in a subnet's pool, the more emissions it earns from each new block.