FAQ

Overview & Core Principles

1. What is FlameWire?

FlameWire is an open, permission-less infrastructure layer that turns the routine act of reading blockchain data into a decentralized public utility. Running as its own subnet on Bittensor, it coordinates a global mesh of full-archive nodes and automatically routes every JSON-RPC call to the healthiest endpoint. For builders, that means a single URL that covers Ethereum, Bittensor, Sui and the chains that follow—without vendor lock-in or regional outages.

2. Who is FlameWire for?

FlameWire serves four main audiences: developers & dApps seeking one endpoint for multiple chains; foundations looking to onboard chains with transparent costs; miners wanting to monetize existing nodes and earn ALPHA emissions; and validators who score miner performance to steer rewards toward the most reliable nodes.

3. What are the core principles of FlameWire?

  • Decentralization-First: Infrastructure lives with the community, not on a single cloud account.

  • Radical Transparency: Emissions, buybacks, and treasury wallets are visible on-chain 24/7.

  • Performance Without Compromise: Full-archive nodes in multiple regions deliver sub-200 ms p99 latency.

  • Censorship Resistance: With hundreds of independent miners, no single party can block or throttle calls.

4. What problem does FlameWire solve?

It addresses three systemic risks of centralized RPC:

  1. Concentration Risk: Federated miner pool removes single-point outages.

  2. Censorship & Opacity: On-chain auditing of every emission, buy-back, and treasury balance.

  3. Performance Trade-Offs: Global load-balancing across archive nodes maintains sub-200 ms p99 latency without sacrificing data completeness.

5. What chains are supported at launch?

FlameWire launches with Ethereum, Bittensor, and Sui, and is architected to add further chains seamlessly via the same universal endpoint.

Architecture & Technology

1. How does FlameWire route JSON-RPC calls?

Client calls to https://rpc.flamewire.io/{chain}/ are load-balanced by Kong across all registered miners. Validators fetch performance data periodically and assign weights so requests are routed to the fastest healthy endpoints.

2. How are miners registered on the network?

Node operators run the FlameWire subnet client, which registers their RPC endpoints at the gateway and periodically submits health metrics (throughput, latency, availability) to the validators.

3. How does FlameWire ensure no single point of failure?

By federating hundreds of independent full-archive nodes across regions with global load-balancing and automatic failover, any miner or provider outage is instantly mitigated by others.

4. How does the billing and credits system work?

Each JSON-RPC call burns prepaid credits (or free-tier allowance). Developer fees accumulate in public wallets, are swapped daily into ALPHA, and feed the treasury, while allowances reset every 24 hours for stakers.

5. How does FlameWire compare to centralized RPC providers?

Unlike centralized gateways, FlameWire is permissionless, vendor-agnostic, offers real-time price discovery via on-chain credits, provides radical transparency, and eliminates single-point failures through a global miner network.

Tokenomics & Economic Model

1. What is the ALPHA token?

ALPHA (sometimes called dTAO) is the subnet’s native token, hard-capped at 21 million with a Bitcoin-style halving schedule. It’s used for validator bonding, miner rewards, governance, and unlocking RPC free-tier credits.

2. How is ALPHA supply distributed?

The total 21 million ALPHA cap is allocated as 41 % to miners, 41 % to stakers, and 18 % to the core team.

3. How do emissions and buybacks work?

About 82 % of daily ALPHA emissions reward miners and stakers. Pay-as-you-go fees collected in USDC, TAO, ETH, or SUI are swapped daily on-chain into ALPHA and burned, creating a deflationary sink proportionate to usage.

4. How are developer fees processed?

Developer payments land in public wallets, are aggregated once per ~24 h epoch, swapped into ALPHA via a multisig, and then immediately sent to the treasury/burn address for full transparency.

5. What is the tokenomics loop?

Increased API demand burns more credits → daily buybacks remove ALPHA from circulation → supply scarcity rises → staking economics improve → more node capacity is deployed → further demand growth.

Developer Onboarding & Usage

1. How do I get started with FlameWire?

Sign in at app.flamewire.io via Google Auth, generate an API key in Dashboard → API Keys, then optionally stake ≥ 10 ALPHA to unlock free-tier credits or purchase pay-as-you-go credits in USDC, TAO, ETH, or SUI.

2. How do I generate and use an API key?

In the Dashboard’s API Keys section, click “Generate Key.” Include it in requests with the header X-API-Key: <YOUR_KEY>.

3. How do I send a JSON-RPC request to FlameWire?

POST to https://rpc.flamewire.io/{chain} with Content-Type: application/json, your X-API-Key header, and a standard JSON-RPC body (e.g., calling eth_blockNumber on Ethereum).

4. How can I check my credit balance?

Navigate to Dashboard → Usage to view your remaining credits and the auto-reset timer that refreshes allowances every 24 hours.

5. Are code examples available?

Yes—documentation includes cURL, JavaScript (Fetch), Python (web3.py), and Sui checkpoint query examples for retrieving block numbers and checkpoint sequences.

Miner & Validator Operations

1. What incentives do miners have?

Miners earn 41 % of the daily ALPHA emissions (≈ 2 952 ALPHA/day), distributed pro-rata based on each miner’s performance weight.

2. What are the hardware requirements for node operators?

Recommended 2025-Q2 specs: NVMe SSDs (< 100 µs latency, ≥ 100 k IOPS), 8–16 vCPU, 32–128 GB RAM, 2–8 TB storage, and ≥ 500 Mbps bandwidth; RAID 0 is advised for Ethereum to boost IOPS.

3. How is miner performance scored?

Validators probe miners every 5 minutes for throughput (req/s), p95 latency (ms), and availability (%). Throughput acts as a gate (below threshold → weight=0), while latency and availability are each weighted at 50 % and normalized into a 0–1 score averaged over five rounds.

4. How can I troubleshoot common miner issues?

Refer to the guide for:

  • weight=0: check chain sync and firewall rules

  • “Insufficient TAO”: top up ≥ 0.01 TAO then reregister

  • High latency: inspect NVMe health and network

  • OOM kills: increase RAM or container limits

  • RPC 403: rotate API key and restart the client.

5. What is the role of a validator in FlameWire?

Validators act as quality-control oracles: they probe miner metrics every 5 min, aggregate scores into a weight vector, and submit set_weights transactions on-chain (~once per 25 min, limited to one per 100 blocks) to allocate daily ALPHA emissions.

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