Bittensor Glossary

Bittensor Glossary (Plain Words)

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Term	Plain meaning
Bittensor	A blockchain network that pays crypto for useful work.
Subnet / SN25	One market inside Bittensor. URnetwork is number 25.
Alpha / $UR	SN25's token.
TAO	Bittensor's main coin. It pays for burns and gas.
Coldkey	Your main wallet. The money goes here. Keep its secret offline. The address starts with 5.
Hotkey	A working key owned by a coldkey. You only need one for the head tier or hotkey sign-in.
Seed / recovery phrase	The secret behind a key. Never put it on a node or in a command line.
Network wallet consent	One signature from your coldkey that says "pay all unbound pool nodes on my URnetwork account to this coldkey". It controls pool payouts only: a bound head-tier node is paid directly to the fleet hotkey instead, and a node with its own per-provider consent is paid to that consent.
Login-proof wallet	The older website or app wallet link. It shows your address but payouts do not use it.
Per-provider consent	A consent for one node only. It wins over the network consent for that node.
Hotkey delegation	Pays a hotkey's account to a coldkey across many operators. Rarely needed.
Operator	A company running URnetwork servers. Today there is one: URnetwork (bringyour.com).
Pool tier	The default. Your nodes earn inside the operator's shared pool.
Head tier / fleet / Top 200	Optional. Your own subnet seat, paid directly, ranked by how many different IP ranges you cover.
UID	A seat on the subnet. There are 256 in total.
Epoch	A 7-day payout period (50,400 blocks).
Tempo	A cycle of about 72 minutes in which the network pays seats.
Claim	The transaction that moves your credited pool earnings to your coldkey. Anyone can send it, and the money always goes to your coldkey.
Claim daemon	A background program that sends claims for you. Optional.
Burn	TAO destroyed to register a seat.
Gas	A small TAO fee for sending a blockchain transaction.
Manifest	The head-tier fleet file: the hotkey plus the member nodes.
Commitment oracle	A URnetwork service that copies fleet commitments to where the binding contract can read them. Built but not deployed yet as of 2026-10-21, so head-tier binds cannot succeed.
Client ID	One node or proxy slot's identity on URnetwork.
Generation	One version of a signed consent. A new signature with a new coldkey makes the next generation. Old epochs keep the generation that covered them.
Relayer key	An EVM key that pays the gas to send a transaction for you. It gets no ownership of what it sends.
Settlement v1 / v2	How pool earnings are paid. v1 covers the earliest epochs, and its claims stay open for 8 epochs plus 1 epoch of grace. v2 is planned for epoch 3 (about 2026-10-23), subject to release gates; its credit never expires once v2 is active.