Incentive Mechanism
This documentation is not finalized. More information will be released for mainnet.
Subnets
Each subnet gets a weight on each epoch based on 3 factors:
Delegate stake weight
Nodes count
Overwatch weights
Delegate Stake Weight
In Hypertensor, the overall token emission is split across multiple subnets every epoch. To determine how much of the total emission each subnet receives, the protocol uses a weighting system based on delegate stake.
This ensures a free market where subnets with more stake from delegators supporting the subnet receive a larger share of emissions — but with diminishing returns, to avoid centralization.
Subnets are weighted according to the amount of stake delegated to them by users. However, the relationship between stake and rewards is not linear. Instead, each subnet’s share of stake is passed through a tunable power curve.
This means
Subnets with more stake get more rewards
But the increase is not 1-to-1 — the curve slightly flattens the difference
This helps prevent large subnets from dominating all emissions, and gives smaller or newer subnets a fairer share
The power curve looks like this
After weights are calculated for all subnets, they're normalized so that they sum to 100%. This gives each subnet a final emission share — its percentage of the total tokens emitted that epoch.
Why This Works
Subnets are rewarded based on how much the community supports them through delegation
The curve ensures no single subnet can dominate the network just by having more stake
This creates a healthier, more diverse ecosystem where smaller subnets can still thrive and grow
Subnet Nodes
Consensus Mechanism
The Hypertensor subnet consensus mechanism is based on the attestation-based consensus mechanism.
Each subnet defines its own incentive mechanism, where nodes perform work and score each other based on the quality or utility of their output. Nodes in the subnet interact peer-to-peer and produce output scores reflecting how useful or correct each other’s contributions are. These scores are submitted as weights — essentially reputation scores — where:
Elected validator node submits a vector of weights for all nodes.
The weights reflect how much trust, usefulness, or performance one node attributes to others.
These weights form a decentralized reputation mesh, unique to the purpose and rules of the subnet.
Once these weights are submitted, other validator nodes (non-elected validators) can begin to attest to the submitted consensus data. The validator must receive a 66% attestation ratio to have rewards emitted to the subnet; otherwise, the subnet and the elected validator node will accrue penalties, incentives are skipped, and the validator will be slashed.
Rewarding Nodes
These weights are used to determine how rewards are distributed to each participating node in the subnet.
At the end of every epoch, Hypertensor uses the finalized weight vector (proposed by the elected validator and attested by others) to distribute token emissions to the participating subnet nodes.
Each node is rewarded based on its final weight relative to the sum of all weights in the subnet for that epoch. In other words, the more highly a node is scored by its peers, the larger its share of the total reward pool.
Overwatch Nodes
Coming soon.
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