Subnet Owner Startup Guide

You’ve got a subnet idea, or you’ve just registered one. This guide takes you from initial design through launch.

The page is split into two halves:

• Designing a subnet — frameworks, incentive mechanism resources, prior-art talks. Useful pre-registration.
• Launching your subnet — identity, validator, starting emission, immunity, UID pruning. Useful post-registration.

For the broader concept of what a subnet owner is, see Subnet Owner.

Designing a subnet

Subnet framework

• The Opentensor Foundation maintains a Subnet Framework. It is old — expect to need many updates.
• namoray (creator of Subnet 19) has created Fiber, a newer alternative.

Incentive mechanism resources

• Watch the YouTube talk on validator setup and incentive design.
• namoray spoke on the Bittensor Guru podcast about his vision of subnets in Episode 20 — a good introduction to subnet creation.
• Rhef (Subnet 12) has published a subnet guide covering practical lessons from running a live subnet.

Launching your subnet

Subnet identity

Identity can be set at registration time, or changed later with btcli s set-identity. This is how Taostats shows your name, logo, and links.

Check the current identity with btcli s get_identity:

                      Current Subnet 1 Identity

           Item ┃ Value
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
         Netuid │ 1
    subnet_name │ Apex
    github_repo │ https://github.com/macrocosm-os/apex
 subnet_contact │ support@macrocosmos.ai
     subnet_url │ https://apex.macrocosmos.ai
        discord │ macrocrux
    description │ Building the world's fastest deep researchers
       logo_url │ https://www.macrocosmos.ai/images/mc_logo_black.png
     additional │ ~
────────────────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────────────
                │

Tips for setting identity

The biggest pitfall is the logo URL.

The logo_url must be the URL of the raw image — not the URL of a page hosting the image.

For example:

❌ https://github.com/taostat/.github/blob/main/profile/taostats.png

This is a page hosting the image. Right-click the image and open it in a new tab to find the raw URL.

✅ https://raw.githubusercontent.com/taostat/.github/refs/heads/main/profile/taostats.png

This is the link to the image served directly by GitHub. Use this form.

Immune owner neurons

Owners can set how many immune neurons they have via the ImmuneOwnerUidsLimit parameter. The default is 1; the max is 10.

Running a validator

All subnet owners have at least one neuron that cannot be deregistered. This is intended to be run as a validator:

• Validators provide access to the subnet’s commodity. With a validator, you have access to your own commodity.
• Mining emission to this hotkey is burned (see Subnet Owner Neuron for details). The owner cannot run a miner on this hotkey to receive alpha.

Setting up a validator

• Make sure your validator is setting weights.
• Work with other validators to ensure they are running the subnet code and that your validator is in consensus.

See also: validator setup walkthrough on YouTube.

Starting emission

Subnets on registration are not active. Run btcli subnet start to start emission on your subnet.

Subnet immunity

You have 4 months of immunity from registration to build up your subnet. After 4 months, if your subnet has the lowest moving price, it may be deregistered.

UID pruning

At launch your subnet has 256 UIDs. This can be reduced to a lower number.

Subnet mechanisms

Subnet mechanisms are a way to run different tasks on a single subnet. See Subnet Architecture — Subnet Mechanisms for the current implementation.

What’s next

• Once your subnet is live, your emission share is governed by the price-based shares formula with miner-burn scaling. See Price-based emission shares for the live formula and its implications for owner self-emission.
• See Subnet Owner for the broader role and responsibilities of a subnet owner.