Miner Burn
Miner Burn measures how much of a subnet's miner emissions are withheld from miners instead of being paid out to them.
Incentives are how a subnet rewards the miners that do its work. But a subnet does not have to pay them out. It can withhold incentives from its miners instead, and miner burn is the share it withholds.
A subnet gains nothing by withholding, and it loses part of its TAO emissions as well. That keeps it rational for subnets to pay their incentives to the miners actually doing the work.
A subnet hands out its incentives to miners according to the weights its validators set. When those weights would send an incentive to a hotkey the subnet owner owns, the protocol withholds it instead of paying it out. This can happen whether the owner runs those validators or other validators "vote" for the owner's hotkeys , and none of the withheld incentive reaches the owner.
Miner Burn is calculated each time a subnet pays out incentives:
A Miner Burn of 0 means none was withheld, and a Miner Burn of 1 means all of it was.
In the formula that sets each subnet's share of TAO emissions, Miner Burn appears as the "(1 − Miner Burn)" factor. The more a subnet withholds, the smaller its share:
| (1 − Miner Burn) Factor | Effect on the Subnet's TAO emissions | |
|---|---|---|
| 0.00 | 1.00 | Full Share |
| 0.30 | 0.70 | 70% of Share |
| 0.75 | 0.25 | 25% of Share |
| 1.00 | 0.00 | 0 % of Share |
You can see how this fits into the full formula on the Emissions page.
A withheld incentive is never paid to the miner, but the subnet chooses what happens to it. There are two options, set per subnet:
- Burn (the default): destroys the ALPHA in place, removes it from circulation but still counted as issues so it can't be re-emitted.
- Recycle : "un-mints" the ALPHA, removes it from circulation and drops the issuance back down, so it's supply-neutral over time and returns to the emittable pool.