Roles & Incentives

1. Purpose

Validators are FlameWire’s “quality‑control oracle.” They measure every miner’s performance and tell the Bittensor subnet contract who deserves what share of the daily ALPHA emissions. Without honest validators, the network could not tell good nodes from bad ones.

2. Responsibilities

• Probe miners for throughput, latency, and availability (using any validation strategy you like).

• Aggregate the scores into a weight vector.

• Publish that vector on‑chain with a set_weights transaction (rate‑limited to one call every 100 blocks ≈ 20 min by Bittensor consensus rules). FlameWire’s reference client samples miners every 5 min, averages five rounds, then submits once (~25 min) to stay under the limit.

3. Earnings & incentives

Source	How you earn it
Staking yield	Bond ALPHA; you share in the 41 % staker allocation—paid every block—proportional to your stake.
Reputation benefits	Accurate, timely weights increase your credibility; subnet owners may whitelist high‑reputation validators for additional off‑chain grants or bounties.

4. Capital requirements

There is no minimum bond to spin up a validator, but your voting power—and therefore your share of the staker pool—scales with the amount of ALPHA you lock. Hardware needs depend on the validation strategy you pick:

• Canonical dataset – cheapest, no chain nodes, light VM.

• Third‑party reference RPCs – mid‑tier cost (API fees).

• Self‑hosted full nodes – highest assurance, highest cap‑ex.

5. Why it pays to be accurate

The network compares your weights with the median of all validators. Large or frequent divergences flag you as noisy (or malicious) and can lead to:

• Lower reputation in explorer dashboards (hurts future bonus eligibility).

• Potential slashing in later governance upgrades.

Conversely, publishing high‑fidelity weights on a stable cadence (≤ every 20 min) maximises both your immediate staking yield and your long‑term upside in validator incentives.