King of the Hill replaces round-based discriminator escrow payouts with continuous rewards to crowned miners.
- 85/10/5 payouts: each discriminator lane rewards the current king and the previous two distinct crowned hotkeys. Default subnet allocation remains 40% image, 40% video, 4% audio, 16% generators. Missing predecessor shares roll up to the current king; unallocatable shares burn.
- Controlled launch: discriminator rewards remain burned until GAS explicitly enables emissions and its start time has passed. Generator rewards continue during warmup. Validators persist the last-known kings across restarts and reuse them during API outages; without a cached response, discriminator shares burn.
- Competition rules: one counted submission per registration across modalities; failed entrance exams do not count. Dethroning requires a +0.01 SN34 score on the same benchmark version. Kings retain payouts during new-version defense; failed or timed-out defenses resolve after the applicable failure or 48-hour deadline. Full rules.
- Better uploads: streamed uploads with progress, already-uploaded hash handling, configurable
--upload-endpoint, optional--skip-chain, and bounded registration retries (--max-retries, default 3; 0 means unlimited). Chain-registration failure no longer turns an accepted upload into a failed push, and CLI exit codes propagate correctly. - Validator reliability and docs: slow block callbacks no longer stall subscriptions; miner discovery has a bounded connection timeout. Updated scoring-aligned metrics and Safetensors-only guidance, consolidated PM2/Docker setup, and
NETUID/EPOCH_LENGTHoverrides.
Upgrade: update and restart validators on v5.0.0 using the validator guide. Installing this release alone does not activate discriminator emissions; GAS controls activation.