Staking & Delegation

What is Staking?

Staking means locking your TAO to a validator's hotkey on a specific subnet via add_stake. When you stake, your TAO leaves your free balance and becomes bonded. You can't spend or transfer it until you unstake. In exchange, you earn a portion of the emissions that flow to that validator.

The amount of stake a validator holds directly affects their influence in consensus. Generally, more stake means more weight in determining miner rankings, which in turn means more responsibility. Validators with more stake have greater impact on which miners receive emissions, creating an economic incentive for validators to evaluate honestly. If they set poor weights, stakers will move their TAO elsewhere.

Unstaking via remove_stake converts your alpha back to TAO and returns it to your free balance. However, staking operations are rate-limited: after each stake or unstake, there is a cooldown before you can perform another staking operation on the same hotkey/subnet pair. This prevents rapid stake movements that could destabilize consensus or be used to manipulate weight-setting across epochs.

Alpha Tokens

When you stake TAO to a validator on a specific subnet, you don't simply "deposit TAO." Instead, you receive alpha tokens in return. Alpha tokens are subnet-level staking tokens that represent your share of the stake pool on that particular subnet. Each subnet has its own alpha token, and its price (relative to TAO) is determined by a liquidity pool mechanism.

The alpha token system creates a market for subnet stake. Popular subnets that attract more stakers will see their alpha price rise, while less popular ones will have cheaper alpha. This means early stakers on a subnet that grows in popularity benefit from price appreciation, similar to how early liquidity providers typically benefit in DeFi protocols. When you unstake, your alpha tokens are converted back to TAO at the current exchange rate.

Alpha prices also affect emission distribution. Subnets with higher total stake (measured in TAO value through their alpha pools) receive a larger share of block emissions through the TAO Flow mechanism. A feedback loop emerges – productive subnets attract stake, which increases their emissions, which attracts more miners and validators, which (ideally) improves quality and attracts more stake.

Delegating Stake

Not everyone wants to (or can) run a validator. Delegation lets TAO holders stake to an existing validator's hotkey, effectively saying "I trust you to set good weights on this subnet – here's my stake to back you." The validator does the work of evaluating miners, and the delegator earns a share of the emissions minus the validator's take rate.

Choosing a validator to delegate to is an important decision. You want to consider their track record (do they set accurate weights?), their take rate (what percentage of emissions do they keep?), and which subnets they operate on (do those subnets align with your interests?). A single coldkey can delegate to multiple hotkeys across multiple subnets, spreading risk and supporting diverse parts of the ecosystem. The bittensor.ai staking dashboard lets you compare validators, see their performance, and track your staking positions.

Validators can also set up child hotkeys, which allow them to delegate a portion of their own stake to other validators. Delegation produces a hierarchical staking structure where large validators can distribute their influence across subnets without running infrastructure on every single one. Child hotkeys inherit a proportional share of the parent's stake for consensus purposes.

Childkey Take Rates

When a validator sets up child hotkeys, the hotkey's owner (coldkey) configures a childkey take rate per subnet via set_childkey_take. This determines how inherited emissions are split between the child and parent hotkeys at each epoch.

How the Split Works

When a parent delegates stake to a child hotkey, the child earns dividends on that inherited stake. At distribution time, the child's take rate determines the split:

• A small burn portion is recycled back to the subnet
• The child keeps parent_share × childkey_take_rate
• The parent receives the remainder
• If parent and child share the same coldkey owner, no take is deducted

Constraints

• The take rate is bounded between MinChildkeyTake and MaxChildkeyTake (governance parameters)
• Changes are rate-limited — a hotkey can only change its take rate once per TxChildkeyTakeRateLimit blocks

For the complete picture of how childkey take interacts with validator take during emission distribution, see Emission Mechanics — Step 5: Epoch Distribution.