Revenue coverage

Every subnet receives TAO from the network. Some subnets also earn money from outside Bittensor. The ratio between the two is the most-asked unanswered question in the ecosystem, and every existing answer is human-curated, login-walled, or has no published method.

This page is the method. It is the only part of this feature that matters, because a coverage ratio without a method is a number somebody made up.

GET https://api.metagraph.sh/api/v1/subnets/64/revenue
GET https://api.metagraph.sh/api/v1/chain/revenue-coverage

Read this first: what the number does not mean

A high subsidy multiple is not an accusation, and a low one is not a badge. An 8:1 ratio means the network directs eight dollars of emission into a subnet for every dollar it earns externally. For an early network deliberately subsidising the creation of capacity, that is a normal number, not a scandal. Bittensor's emission schedule exists precisely to fund work ahead of revenue.

"No observable external revenue" is not "no revenue." It is the honest description of 127 of 129 subnets, and about a quarter of the network visibly sells things while publishing no figure at all — pricing pages, billing endpoints, checkout flows, none of it readable on a schedule. A subnet reporting null here has not been measured; it has not been judged.

A subnet that publishes its revenue will usually look worse than one that hides it. That is the perverse incentive built into any transparency metric, and it is worth stating plainly: SN64 appears in this dataset with an 8:1 ratio because Chutes publishes a public revenue endpoint. Subnets that publish nothing get a null, not a bad score. Do not read the ranking as a quality ordering.

The ratio is not profitability. The numerator is external revenue, not profit; the denominator is emission received, not cost. Nothing here accounts for what a team spends.

The two hard rules

1. No estimation, no modelling, no gap-filling. Only figures that were read from a public source or observed on-chain reach the headline. Nothing is extrapolated from a sample, inferred from usage, or scaled from a comparable subnet.
2. Absent revenue is null, never 0. coverage_ratio and subsidy_multiple are null whenever revenue is unobserved. A subnet that earned nothing and a subnet nobody could measure are different facts, and rendering the second as "0% covered" would be a false claim about 127 subnets at once.

Both rules are enforced in code rather than by convention, and the response carries a verification block whose checks fail loudly when they are violated.

The provenance ladder

Every figure carries an evidence class. It is a required field on every response — there is no shape in which a caller receives a revenue number without knowing how it was obtained.

Tier A is a spot-check, not a substitute for Tier B. Measured on SN64 for 2026-08-08, the on-chain TAO channel carried $1,036.50 against $9,776.06 of total revenue — 10.6%. The rest is card and pay-as-you-go, off-chain and unverifiable by construction. Chain verification corroborates an operator's honesty on the slice it can see; the headline still rests on probe-derived.

The denominator

The published basis is tao_total — SubnetTaoInEmission + SubnetExcessTao, the TAO the network directs into a subnet. It is chosen because it is fully measured: both components are read from chain storage rather than reconstructed.

Two alternates are computed and published alongside, and never silently substituted:

• alpha_out_priced — alpha emitted, priced at the subnet's alpha price
• owner_take — the owner's share, which is 18% (SubnetOwnerCut = 11796/65535 = 0.17999…), not one sixth

A ratio whose denominator changed without saying so is worse than no ratio, so the basis is a field in the response.

The worked example

SN64 (Chutes), entirely from public sources, as of 2026-08-10:

emission   tao_total 0.063615264 TAO/block x 7200 blocks   = 458.0 TAO/day
           x $204.03/TAO                                    = $93,452/day
revenue    api.chutes.ai/daily_revenue_summary              = $11,668/day

COVERAGE RATIO   11,668 / 93,452  = 12.5 %
SUBSIDY MULTIPLE 93,452 / 11,668  = 8.01 : 1

Every input is a public route. The emission side comes from /chain/emission-pipeline, the price from /network/tao-usd, and the revenue from the subnet's own endpoint. Re-running it is the point; if you cannot reproduce a figure on this site, that is a bug worth reporting.

The ecosystem is still widely quoting a 22–40:1 range for this subnet from a March 2026 essay.

The traps

Each of these produced a wrong answer during the survey of all 129 subnets. They are listed because a reader re-deriving these numbers will meet the same ones.

1. A miner payout is not revenue — it is the denominator. SN4 Targon's stats.targon.com/api/miners exposes payout, which is emission flowing out to miners. Counting it as revenue puts the denominator in the numerator. Same class: SN46 and SN60 publish prize pools, SN74 publishes contributor rewards, SN11 publishes what it spends. A "stats" endpoint is guilty until proven revenue.

2. The unit is not in the path. api.chutes.ai/payments/summary/tao is named for TAO and reconciles as USD. Currency is declared per surface, never inferred from a URL.

3. A channel is a subset, not an addend. Chutes publishes both /payments (the TAO channel, ~$1k/day) and daily_revenue_summary (all channels, ~$11k/day). The first is contained in the second. The registry declares this with supersedes, and a subsumed surface is reported with its own figure and never summed into the headline — including when its superseder is unavailable, because reporting a tenth of the truth as the whole reads as a real number and is worse than the null it replaces.

4. A cumulative total is not a windowed figure. A lifetime total of $2.3M and a daily figure of $11.7k cannot be added, and a grain contributes to a window only when the window is a whole number of its periods. A cumulative surface never reaches a windowed sum; a monthly one cannot answer "yesterday".

5. Gross is not external. sponsored_inference is subnet-funded, pending_instance_revenue is unrecognised. Both are excluded from the headline and shown separately.

6. Attribution is evidence, not inference. A high-volume address receiving from many parties looks exactly like a payment collector — and on SN64 the address that looked most like one turned out to be the subnet's own protocol TAO reserve, whose inbound is users staking. That is a capital flow, not revenue, and counting it would have overstated the subnet by orders of magnitude. Protocol-derived accounts are rejected at the schema level, because being careful is not enough when the wrong answer looks right.

7. Surfaces rot, and feeds get withdrawn. An operator can remove a revenue endpoint once an unflattering ratio is published. Each observation retains a hash of the exact response it was read from, so a withdrawal degrades to a dated record rather than vanishing.

Circularity is tracked separately: revenue paid in a subnet's own alpha, or funded by a team selling its emissions, is not external. The flag defaults to unknown rather than to external.

How the figures are collected

Surfaces that declare a readable revenue figure are polled hourly. The cadence is chosen for restatement rather than freshness: a daily total grows through the day, so an hourly pass settles each day's final value where a single daily snapshot would capture a mid-afternoon number and store it as the day.

Only USD figures reach the headline. A TAO-denominated figure would need the exchange rate at each observation's own instant to become comparable, which is a conversion rather than a cast, so such a surface is declared operator-attested instead of being silently converted.

A fetch that fails is recorded as a failure, never as a zero.

What we would still call unknown

• Most of the network. Two subnets publish a readable figure. Three more declare revenue endpoints that are auth-gated. Roughly a quarter visibly sell something and publish no number.
• Off-chain revenue, in general. Card payments cannot be verified independently; the chain sees ~10% of SN64's.
• Whether a published figure is complete. We report what an operator publishes and can corroborate; we cannot see revenue they do not publish.

Absence is recorded with a date and a list of where the search looked, so that "we found nothing" is a claim somebody else can re-run and disagree with.

Related

• Wallet attribution — what each wallet role means, the evidence it requires, and what unresolved means on the owner-cut side.