# 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).\
  \&#xNAN;*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.
