dTAO and alpha tokens: every subnet has its own currency
This lesson explains how a whole competition's overall slice of the network's payout gets decided, before any internal split happens.
Every subnet has its own currency, called alpha, traded against TAO inside that contest's own small market. Committing money there buys it at the market's current price; pulling that money back out sells it again — and what someone holds in one contest is worth nothing in another; they are entirely separate tokens. [source]
How big a whole contest's overall daily payout is — before any of it splits between builder, workers, and judges — comes from how much people want that contest's currency, not from a vote or a committee: the network tracks a moving average of the token's price and hands out its share in proportion to it. [source]
This price-driven split is a specific, dated redesign called dTAO: before a cutover in February 2025 a contest's slice of the payout was decided differently, and the switch converted everyone's existing stake into a shared pool the moment it went live. [source]
In a snapshot at block 8,852,388, the three highest-earning subnets took in 70.2% @ 8852388 of all network emission between them, and the top six took in 81.6% @ 8852388; this concentration moves as token prices move and is not a fixed feature of the design.
How it actually works
Mechanically, each subnet runs an automated market maker with two reserves, TAO-in and alpha-in; the spot price is a weighted ratio between them (weights start at 0.5/0.5, nudged slightly by every emission injection rather than by a trade), and a subnet's emission share is p_i × (1 − b_i) ⁄ Σ_j p_j × (1 − b_j), where p is that moving-average price and b is a penalty for emission the owner withheld to its own keys. [source] [source] [source]
New subnets start with a moving average near zero and only catch up slowly — the default smoothing window is about four weeks — which is a deliberate brake on a brand-new token's price, and therefore its emission share, being pushed upward overnight by launch pumps or coordinated buying. [source]