What changed in Bittensor

On 10 August the network stopped reducing a project's share of the daily payout when that project held back pay from its own workers. Two days later it put that rule back. So a project that withholds worker pay once again earns a smaller share of network income.

Bittensor pays out TAO every day, and that money is split between the subnets. Until now the split leaned heavily on votes, which meant a subnet could earn well without many people using it.

The change ties more of the payout to real usage. Build something people use and you earn more. Build something nobody touches and you earn less, however popular you are with voters.

Fees used to be paid to the operators who produce blocks. Now they are destroyed instead, and the network creates that much less new TAO to compensate. In simple terms, the more the network gets used, the more slowly new supply appears.

Bittensor has a second layer that runs smart contracts, the same kind of programs used on Ethereum. Until now those programs could only reach a limited set of the network's features. This update opens up nearly all of them, adding five new access points and well over a hundred new functions.

People who keep their TAO on a hardware wallet used to be shown an unreadable code when placing an order. They now see a plain description of the order they are about to approve.

Two common mistakes, submitting work too quickly and submitting from an account that is not permitted, were being accepted into blocks and only then failing. They are now refused up front.

The main tool people use to manage wallets now supports wallets requiring several approvals, shows clearer staking information, and can print a machine readable plan of what a command would do before doing it.

The new fund system shipped with an error. If an operator held TAO at the top level but was not properly registered there, the maths credited its whole reward as if earned on a single project instead. Operators holding tiny amounts of a project's token were displaying annual returns between 7,000 and 40,000 percent. Those returns were never real, but the money chasing them was.

Paying directly into the new operator funds was disabled almost immediately after launch, while the team checks how much storage each deposit consumes. Every deposit can create a new record for each project an operator supports, and every later withdrawal has to read through all of them.

Version 443 has been prepared and is waiting for approval signatures from the small group who authorise upgrades. It is not running on the network yet.

If you stake TAO at the network's top level, your rewards used to return to you directly. They now go into a fund attached to whichever operator you staked with, and that operator decides which projects the money supports. When you put money in, your shares are priced at the fund's value beforehand, so people joining later cannot dilute you.