Documentation / Bittensor concepts / Subnets
Subnet owner startup guide
Last reviewed 2026-09-15
You've got a subnet idea, or you've just registered one. This guide takes you from initial design through launch.
The page is split into two halves:
- Designing a subnet — frameworks, incentive mechanism resources, prior-art talks. Useful pre-registration.
- Launching your subnet — identity, validator, starting emission, immunity, UID pruning. Useful post-registration.
For the broader concept of what a subnet owner is, see Subnet Owner.
Designing a subnet
Incentive mechanism resources
Talk on validator setup and incentive design:
- namoray spoke on the Bittensor Guru podcast about his vision of subnets in Episode 20 — a good introduction to subnet creation.
- Rhef (Subnet 12) has published a subnet guide covering practical lessons from running a live subnet.
Launching your subnet
Subnet identity
Identity can be set at registration time, or changed later with btcli s set-identity. This is how Taostats shows your name, logo, and links.
Check the current identity with btcli s get_identity:
text
Current Subnet 1 Identity
Item ┃ Value
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
Netuid │ 1
subnet_name │ Apex
github_repo │ https://github.com/macrocosm-os/apex
subnet_contact │ [email protected]
subnet_url │ https://apex.macrocosmos.ai
discord │ macrocrux
description │ Building the world's fastest deep researchers
logo_url │ https://www.macrocosmos.ai/images/mc_logo_black.png
additional │ ~
────────────────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────────────
│
Immune owner neurons
Owners can set how many immune neurons they have via the ImmuneOwnerUidsLimit parameter. The default is 1; the max is 10.
Running a validator
All subnet owners have at least one neuron that cannot be deregistered. This is intended to be run as a validator:
- Validators provide access to the subnet's commodity. With a validator, you have access to your own commodity.
- Mining emission to this hotkey is burned (see Subnet Owner Neuron for details). The owner cannot run a miner on this hotkey to receive alpha.
Setting up a validator
- Make sure your validator is setting weights.
- Work with other validators to ensure they are running the subnet code and that your validator is in consensus.
Starting emission
Subnets on registration are not active. Run btcli subnet start to start emission on your subnet.
Subnet immunity
You have 4 months of immunity from registration to build up your subnet. After 4 months, if your subnet has the lowest moving price, it may be deregistered.
UID pruning
At launch your subnet has 256 UIDs. This can be reduced to a lower number.
Subnet mechanisms
Subnet mechanisms are a way to run different tasks on a single subnet. See Subnet Architecture — Subnet Mechanisms for the current implementation.
What's next
- Once your subnet is live, your emission share is governed by the demand formula (price EMA with miner-burn scaling) feeding the spec 440 emission gate. See Subnet Emissions for how emission is computed and its implications for owner self-emission.
- See Subnet Owner for the broader role and responsibilities of a subnet owner.