Developer Guides

Last updated: Aug 03, 2026

Bittensor is an open source platform where participants produce best-in-class digital commodities, including compute power, storage space, artificial intelligence (AI) inference and training, protein folding, financial markets prediction, and many more.

Bittensor is composed of distinct subnets. Each subnet is an independent community of miners (who produce the commodity), and validators (who evaluate the miners' work).

The Bittensor network constantly emits liquidity, in the form of newly created TAO ( $\tau$ ) and subnet-specific alpha tokens, to participants in proportion to the value of their contributions. Participants include:

Miners—Work to produce digital commodities. See mining in Bittensor.
Validators—Evaluate the quality of miners' work. See validating in Bittensor
Subnet Creators—Manage the incentive mechanisms that specify the work miners and validators must perform and evaluate, respectively. See Create a Subnet
Stakers—TAO holders can support specific validators by staking TAO to them. See Staking.

Browse the subnets

Browse the subnets and explore links to their code repositories on TAO.app's subnets listings.

Start here

Participate

You can participate in an existing subnet as either a subnet validator or a subnet miner, or by staking your TAO to running validators.

Staking and Delegation

Get to know staking and delegation on the Bittensor network.

Mining in Bittensor

Get ready to mine on Bittensor subnets

Validating in Bittensor

Get ready to validate on Bittensor subnets

Emissions

Learn how emissions are calculated.

Governance

Learn how Bittensor governance transitions to full community ownership.

Running a subnet

Ready to run your own subnet? Follow the below links.

Create a subnet

Step-by-step instructions for creating a subnet locally, on testchain, or mainchain.

OCR subnet tutorial

Convert your validated incentive-mechanism notebook into a working subnet.

Subnet hyperparameters

Get to know subnet hyperparameters and how to use them effectively.

Run a local Bittensor blockchain

Set up a local Subtensor instance for testing and development.

Build on Bittensor

Use the Bittensor SDK, CLI and Wallet SDK to develop against the network, or call the chain directly.

Bittensor Python SDK

Build miners, validators and tooling in Python.

Bittensor CLI

Manage wallets, stake and subnet operations from the command line.

Bittensor Wallet

Create and manage coldkeys and hotkeys programmatically.

Subtensor API

Generated reference for the extrinsics, storage, events and errors the chain exposes.

Bittensor EVM

Deploy smart contracts and call precompiles on the Bittensor EVM.

Get help

If the chain rejects a call, Subtensor Error Codes explains the error variants the runtime returns and how they reach you through btcli, the SDK and PolkadotJS. Troubleshooting covers the problems that come up most often when running miners and validators.

For everything else, the Bittensor community links collect the Discord channels, block explorers and dashboards that the ecosystem uses day to day.

Start here​

Introduction to Bittensor

Bittensor frequently asked questions (FAQ)

Guide to Bittensor tools

Glossary

Participate​