Attribution method
The rules every owner-capture surface publishes under — what we will say about who controls a wallet, what we will not, and how to check us.
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Some of what this API publishes is about where a subnet's money goes: how much emission the owner receives, whether an owner-run validator keeps what it earns, whether a treasury allocation matches what a subnet says it takes.
Those are the most useful figures here and the easiest to get wrong in a way that harms someone. A wrong revenue number is an error. "This team is quietly taking 60%" is not retractable once an agent has quoted it.
This page is the standard we hold ourselves to. It is published rather than internal so you can check us against it, and so a subnet operator who thinks we have it wrong knows exactly which rule to point at.
1. A take rate does not tell you what an operator keeps
What a validator operator actually retains is:
kept = take × dividends + (1 − take) × dividends × (operator_stake ÷ total_stake_on_hotkey)A validator with an 18% take and no self-stake keeps 18%. The same validator, fully self-staked, keeps 100%. The take is published on chain and tells you almost nothing on its own — the self-stake fraction is the decisive term.
So we do not report "the owner takes X%" from a take rate. Take-rate-only analysis is worse than none, because it looks rigorous.
2. A large nominator is not evidence of anything
Concentrated delegation behind an owner-run validator has at least four innocent explanations before "hidden team wallet":
- a custodial exchange staking on behalf of many users
- a delegation service
- a single unaffiliated whale
- a DAO or treasury with no relationship to the subnet
Every one produces the identical on-chain shape. The default verdict for an unlabelled coldkey is unresolved — never owner.
3. Affiliation needs linkable evidence, not correlation
A coldkey moves above unresolved only on evidence you can check:
| Evidence | What it is |
|---|---|
funding-path | a transfer from the owner coldkey, cited to the extrinsic |
chain-identity | an on-chain identity naming the team |
self-declared | the subnet's own docs, repo or site — pinned to a commit SHA, because a branch moves under the claim |
key-rotation | a coldkey swap or hotkey rotation linking the two |
known-entity | a labelled third party, which supports third-party rather than affiliated |
Timing correlation, similar stake sizes and "registered in the same block" are reviewer hints, not publishable evidence. They are exactly the reasoning that turns a coincidence into an allegation.
This is enforced in the schema, not by convention: a verdict above unresolved cannot be serialised without an evidence entry, and an evidence entry without a source_url or an extrinsic_hash is refused. owner is the one exemption, because it comes from SubtensorModule.SubnetOwner and the chain read is itself the citation.
4. Disclosed is not dishonest
A treasury allocation written into a subnet's own public repository is a disclosed business model, not a deception. Publishing it as a scandal would be a misrepresentation in the other direction.
The signal worth serving is divergence between what a subnet declares and what the chain shows — and the honest headline for most subnets is "declared take matches observed take." If a surface cannot produce that boring answer, it is not a measurement.
5. Right of reply
operator-attested is already a first-class provenance class here: displayed, and never summed into a headline. Subnet teams get the same deal on wallets. Declare your affiliated coldkeys and your treasury policy and we publish the declaration beside the measurement, showing where the two agree.
A team that declares gets a cleaner card. A team that stays silent gets unresolved — a neutral fact, not an allegation.
6. We publish the mechanism, never the motive
| We do not say | We say |
|---|---|
| "The owner secretly takes 60% of emission" | "60% of emission is attributed to UIDs held by the owner coldkey and one unresolved coldkey" |
| "This subnet is a scam" | "98% of registered miner UIDs recorded zero emission over the last 31 days" |
| "The team dumped tokens" | "44,186 TAO unstaked and 88,284 staked by the owner coldkey over 30 days; net accumulating" |
| "Hidden 10% tax on miners" | "A 10% treasury allocation is present in the subnet's published source at <permalink>" |
Each pair is the same underlying number. The right-hand column is defensible, sourceable, and more useful to someone deciding where to put capital.
Two things these surfaces cannot see
Root delegation. Root (netuid 0) stake is TAO-denominated with a tao_weight of 0.18, and root stakers earn dividends in alpha. It is a capture path that is invisible on a subnet's own metagraph — a subnet-scoped measurement cannot see it, and says so rather than implying its absence.
Per-subnet take. take is stored globally per hotkey, not per subnet, so a validator operating on six subnets reports the same take on all six. A null take means no Delegates entry — not 0%. Childkey takes dilute it further, are read live, and have no history at all.
If you think we have this wrong
Open an issue naming the rule and the row. A claim that cannot survive that conversation should not have been published, and we would rather correct it than defend it.
Accounts
GET /api/v1/accounts/{ss58} and its 22 sub-resources — identity, balance, holdings, activity feeds, network participation, and stake movement for one SS58 address. No API key.
Badges
Embeddable SVG status badges for a subnet's or provider's README — probe-derived only, never a self-reported number.