Guerilla subnets

Proposals
1

There is a need for subnets in which the owner has absolute authority over emissions, but that need conflicts with the reality which we’ve been facing in 2025/2026 where some (many, really) subnet owners were acting maliciously in order to get emissions while not really building decentralized AI together at all. Their subnets received Tao emissions but they didn’t advance the mission of Bittensor and thus eroded the value of Tao, which we all ride on.

It might just be that we need two types of subnets:

  • Regular (regulated) subnet, where burn police attempts to thwart exploitation
  • Guerilla (unregulated) subnet with no root validator oversight, root sell pressure, with TaoWeight = 0 where sending all the incentive to a coldkey operated by the subnet owner is perfectly fine

Now in order to make this happen without risking the value of Tao we would need to make a surprisingly small amount of changes:

  • Add a type argument to subnet registration (standard/guerilla)
  • Guerilla subnets will have an entry in something like SubnetType (*1)
  • Migration from Standard to Guerilla is a terrible idea as it’d allow the owner to preload the LP and then bleed it in peace. Doesn’t make sense. The other way around it doesn’t seem like we can allow that safely either. Assume no migrations at all, if you want to run the same subnet on another slot just pay the registration fee again. TBH I don’t think guerilla subnets will ever want to go to Standard anyway.
  • Change the emission share distribution function to suppress taoflow-based emission to guerilla subnets
  • TaoWeight for guerilla subnets is going to be zero (*2)
  • Guerilla subnet LP will have user_liquidity set to Enabled. Since it doesn’t get any emissions from the share distribution
  • Guerilla subnet owners will need to pay a little bit for gas for running Yuma, allowing miners and validators to consume chain space with their neuron storage maps etc
  • If the subnet owner account runs out of Tao for gas for epoch, the epochs and emission will stop and the subnet will enter an inactive state
  • Guerilla subnet owners will have a greatly loosened authority over subnet hyperparameters. Want to set bonds_moving_average = 1, max_uids=2, set epoch to once a week and turn off registration? Not a problem!
  • (optionally) If a guerilla subnet is inactive for lets say a month, it will get deregistered

*1) I don’t want to duplicate 120 storage maps to have GuerillaBondsMovingAverage, GuerillaKappa etc, I also wanted to keep them very separate so that nobody can say they thought this subnet was safe, but that doesn’t seem to be feasible.

*2) The root validators should not have any power over guerilla subnets and yes, it’d be moved from a global hyperparameter to a per-subnet hyperparameter, but it’s rather easy.

2

Changed the description to explain why migration between the types is probably not gonna happen.