Incentive mechanism and business logic for Subnet 49 (Nepher) on Bittensor.

Tournament Cycle

Each tournament proceeds through five sequential periods:

┌────────────┬────────────┬────────────┬────────────┬────────────┐
│  CONTEST   │   SUBMIT   │ EVALUATION │   REVIEW   │   REWARD   │
├────────────┼────────────┼────────────┼────────────┼────────────┤
│ Miners     │ Eligibility│ Validators │ Admin      │ Winner     │
│ submit     │ snapshot   │ evaluate & │ reviews &  │ receives   │
│ agents     │ locked     │ score      │ approves   │ weight     │
└────────────┴────────────┴────────────┴────────────┴────────────┘

• Contest: Miners train policies locally and submit agents (signed with their Bittensor hotkey).
• Submit: The eligible miner list is snapshotted from the metagraph — only registered miners with an active submission are included. The list locks before evaluation. Only the latest agent per miner is scored.
• Evaluation: Validators download each eligible agent and run it against standardized Isaac Lab environments via eval-nav. Scores are submitted to the tournament backend and aggregated via stake-weighted averaging (ties broken by earliest submission time).
• Review: The admin team verifies the top submission to confirm no cheating and approves the winner.
• Reward: Validators direct all remaining on-chain weight to the approved winner's UID, refreshed hourly.

Period boundaries are defined by Bittensor block numbers, converted to Unix timestamps by the backend.

Weight Distribution

Multiple tournaments can be active simultaneously. Validators emit a single combined weight vector each cycle:

• Each non-reward tournament allocates 1% (fixed) to its current preliminary leader (if present in the metagraph).
• The reward-period tournament's approved winner receives all remaining weight (1 − 1% × N leaders).
• Anything unresolved — no active tournaments, no approved winner, or winner not in metagraph — burns on UID 0.

Tournament reward periods never overlap by design. Weights are processed in deterministic (ID-sorted) order; identical weight sets committed within 15 minutes are deduplicated and skipped.

The winner-takes-all structure is episodic by design — avoiding continuous daily rewards reduces sell pressure and preserves alpha token scarcity.

Miner Eligibility

• Requires both on-chain registration (present in the metagraph) and an agent submission during the contest or submit period.
• If an eligible miner is deregistered before or during evaluation/reward, it still receives its reward. The owner team will notify them to re-register. Hotkey-based emission is mandatory.

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Subnet 49 (Nepher) — Robotics Tournament Subnet