Conviction

In Bittensor, almost everything is competitive. Miners compete for incentives, validators compete for stake , and subnets compete for emissions . Subnet ownership itself has been the exception. An owner once set stays fixed, meaning an owner can stop managing their subnet and keep collecting their 18% emission cut with no way for investors/stakers to change that.

Conviction changes this. Any staker can lock ALPHA on a subnet over time, building conviction that reflects how much stake they have committed and for how long. The staker with the highest conviction at a time becomes the new owner.

To lock stake, a staker chooses how much ALPHA to lock and which hotkey to lock it to on a given subnet. There is no fixed duration to choose. Locks are perpetual by default and remain active until the staker decides to start the unlocking.

Once locked, the ALPHA is committed to that hotkey on that subnet. The staker cannot unstake the locked portion until they have started unlocking and enough time has passed for the locked amount to be freed. A lock can be topped up at any time by adding more ALPHA to the same hotkey.

Conviction is a continuously updated score that grows toward the locked amount over time. When a staker first locks, their conviction starts at zero and gradually matures to roughly 50% after one half-life (around 21 days), 63% after one "maturity period" (around 30 days), 86% after two "maturity periods" (around 60 days), and 95% after three (around 90 days).

This means a short/"flash" lock provides almost no conviction at the moment of locking. Only ALPHA that has been committed and held over time carries weight.

Locks are perpetual by default. The locked amount stays fixed and conviction continues to mature toward it indefinitely. When a staker is ready to unlock their ALPHA, they can switch the lock into "decaying" mode. At that point, the locked amount begins to shrink gradually at the unlock rate (which is approximately 130 days). As it shrinks, the corresponding ALPHA becomes available to unstake again. Conviction follows the locked amount down as it decays.

If a staker changes their mind during a decay, they can stop the unlocking at any time. The locked amount then freezes at its current decayed value and the decay stops.

1. A staker has 1,000 ALPHA staked and locks 800 ALPHA.
2. Immediately, 200 ALPHA is available to unstake.
3. After 60 days, conviction has matured to around 86% of the locked amount (~688), but the locked amount is still 800 ALPHA, so only 200 ALPHA is available to unstake.
4. The staker then starts the unlocking. After around 90 days of decay (~50% remaining), the locked amount is ~400 ALPHA, so up to 600 ALPHA is now available.
5. Once the locked amount fully decays, all 1,000 ALPHA is available again.

The subnet owner is treated differently from other stakers. Every block , the owner's emission cut (their 18% share of ALPHA emissions) gets automatically added to their locked amount. This means the owner continuously builds up locked stake as the subnet emits, and cannot unstake that ALPHA without first starting to unlock and waiting for it to decay.

Because the owner's locked amount grows continuously through auto-lock, their conviction always directly reflects their current locked amount. Other stakers experience a maturity "lag" before their conviction catches up to their locked amount.

At the end of each epoch, the protocol checks conviction across all stakers on each subnet. The hotkey with the highest total conviction, summed across all coldkeys locked to it, becomes the new subnet owner. There are two conditions that must both be met for this to happen:

• The subnet must be at least 1 year old
• The total conviction across all stakers on that subnet must be at least 10% of the total ALPHA held by users as stake on that subnet

If either condition is not met, no ownership change happens. This prevents takeovers of new subnets or subnets with not enough lock participation.