Emissions policy

Cacheon separates economic accounting from chain publication. Settlement creates content-addressed claims. A policy projects those claims into an exact 1,000,000-part weight vector. A separate signer journals, submits, reads back, and confirms that vector.

Policy bytes are validator consensus configuration. They are not supplied by a miner, inferred from a bundle, or changed by an operator after observing a result.

Policy generations

Two generations coexist so retained evidence remains reopenable:

Only legacy V1 can publish weights. The extracted V2 implementation and its durable evidence remain reopenable from Git history and the reserved schema.

Legacy V1

Every active registered target defines one reward family. A singleton target owns one slot. An atomic target owns its complete member set and suppresses explicitly overlapping singleton families while active. Packaging, integration, and release records do not create additional reward families.

For a retained crown with speedup_ppm > 1_000_000, age a, and policy half-life h, standing credit is:

improvement = speedup_ppm - 1_000_000
credit      = floor(improvement * h / (h + a))

Retirement or neutralization removes standing credit. A stale, incompatible, missing, or unreopenable active crown holds the complete projection; its share is not silently redistributed. An active claimant absent from the bound metagraph does not hold the vector: that family's allocated standing or live-discovery share is published to the validator hotkey for this tick. Other families keep the ppm they would have received if the claimant were still registered. If the hotkey returns, the next projection pays it again at the then-current decayed credit.

A discovery qualification can create one non-renewable bounded claim. It does not install an evaluation-stack contribution or create a standing family. Duplicate packaging, promotion, integration, or release cannot renew that claim.

The V1 projector reopens every active stack and claim, binds exact finalized chain scope and metagraph membership, aggregates credit by hotkey, and normalizes one positive integer-ppm vector totaling 1,000,000.

All-uncrowned bootstrap

Normal V1 projection refuses to publish without a real crown. An operator may explicitly direct the complete vector to a registered burn hotkey:

cacheon set-weights \
  --intake-db chain_intake/intake.sqlite3 \
  --netuid <NETUID> \
  --network <NETWORK_OR_WSS_URL> \
  --wallet default \
  --hotkey validator \
  --half-life-blocks <BLOCKS> \
  --discovery-lifetime-blocks <BLOCKS> \
  --discovery-pool-ppm <PPM> \
  --refresh-blocks <BLOCKS> \
  --burn-hotkey <REGISTERED_BURN_HOTKEY> \
  --dry-run

The burn path is valid only when all of these are true:

• there is no active standing or discovery claim;
• no evaluation arena has a crowned generation;
• V2 composition has not been activated; and
• the burn hotkey belongs to the exact projection metagraph.

The same command fails closed as soon as real economic authority exists.

Subnet-owner burn bootstrap

--burn-to-subnet-owner is the chain-resolved variant of the same all-uncrowned bootstrap: instead of naming a burn hotkey it resolves the subnet owner's registration from the finalized metagraph and publishes the identical crownless full-pool projection through the durable intent/pending/confirmed journal, with the same refusals the moment any active claim, crowned arena, or activated composition exists. Each pass resolves the burn sink fresh (or stops before signing with --dry-run):

cacheon set-weights \
  --burn-to-subnet-owner \
  --netuid <NETUID> \
  --network <NETWORK_OR_WSS_URL> \
  --intake-db chain_intake/intake.sqlite3 \
  --half-life-blocks <BLOCKS> \
  --discovery-lifetime-blocks <BLOCKS> \
  --discovery-pool-ppm <PPM> \
  --refresh-blocks <BLOCKS> \
  --wallet default \
  --hotkey validator \
  --dry-run

cacheon set-weights \
  --burn-to-subnet-owner \
  --netuid <NETUID> \
  --network <NETWORK_OR_WSS_URL> \
  --intake-db chain_intake/intake.sqlite3 \
  --half-life-blocks <BLOCKS> \
  --discovery-lifetime-blocks <BLOCKS> \
  --discovery-pool-ppm <PPM> \
  --refresh-blocks <BLOCKS> \
  --wallet default \
  --hotkey validator \
  --watch \
  --interval <SECONDS>

Resolution uses the finalized metagraph RuntimeAPI fields owner_coldkey, owner_hotkey, and per-UID coldkeys from that same block-bound snapshot (no unpinned subnet() / storage fallback). Candidates are UIDs whose coldkey equals the subnet owner. Prefer owner_hotkey when it is among those candidates; otherwise choose the lowest matching UID. Fail closed when the owner coldkey is missing or no owned neuron is registered. Publication runs through the standard journaled reconciler with require_current_crown=False, so intent, pending, confirmed, and held states are durable in the intake database, a foreign in-flight journal head is refused, and settlement-state refusals surface as nonretryable publication faults that stop a --watch loop.

V1 publication loop

set-weights supports one reconciliation or a continuous operator loop:

cacheon set-weights <POLICY_AND_SIGNER_ARGUMENTS> \
  --watch \
  --interval <SECONDS>

Watch mode reruns the complete authority refresh and reconciliation. It uses bounded retry for retryable transport or chain faults and does not retry a nonretryable publication fault. It cannot be combined with --dry-run, --reconcile-only, or --release-hold.

Before signing, the reconciler refreshes finalized authority. A later finalized head is acceptable only when the validator UID and every weighted recipient UID remain unchanged. UID reassignment before signing aborts publication; reassignment after submission prevents confirmation and retains a hold.

The publication journal distinguishes intent, pending, confirmed, held, and released. An SDK success response is not confirmation. Confirmation requires an exact finalized readback of the intended recipient set and values within the fixed verifier tolerance.

Signer-free modes reopen journal state without submitting:

• --reconcile-only grades retained publication state against chain authority.
• --release-hold "reason" appends an audited release; it does not approve or submit the old vector.

Finite-debt V2

V2 finite debt is a retained design, not implemented code. Its implementation — fixed-point finite registered-CROWN principal, a separate bounded reviewed-discovery bounty class, content-addressed one-campaign composition policies, wallet-free atomic activation, and gapless confirmed-boundary debt publication — was extracted from the tree on 2026-08-09 without ever being activated. The complete implementation, its policy arithmetic, the reviewed selection-report identities, and the deterministic load study remain in Git history at dc158fb4.

The design intent retained for a future reintroduction:

• an eligible post-activation crown receives a finite bounded claim that is paid down over later confirmed epochs — no perpetual royalty;
• a later crown does not erase an unpaid balance;
• reviewed discovery pays a separate bounded bounty class; and
• activation is an explicit, independently approved one-way cutover, never an inference from implemented arithmetic.

Two compatibility artifacts remain in the tree: chain/reserved_schema.py preserves the schema-4/5/6 migrations and V2 table DDL verbatim so existing intake databases keep validating, and the shared-weight offer wire schema keeps its lane/debt_binding fields with debt-lane payloads rejected. Reintroducing V2 is a new reviewed change with its own design and security review, not a revert switch.

Operational invariants

• Preserve one writer for a validator/database authority.
• Back up SQLite with WAL-aware tooling and retain every referenced evidence root.
• Treat policy, campaign, reserve, membership, and activation digests as immutable.
• Treat claimant departure and UID reassignment differently. A currently absent claimant's family share goes to the validator for that tick under the bound projection; unexplained UID reassignment still halts publication. Never rewrite a historical boundary from a later metagraph snapshot.
• Never repair a hold by deleting journal rows, editing debt, or replacing evidence with a summary.
• Keep evaluator containers separate from wallet and signer authority.

Current evidence limits

• No live V2 activation or debt-publication receipt ever existed, and the V2 implementation is no longer in the tree.
• Registered discovery promotion remains unsupported.
• Historical signer-free shadows and synthetic load sweeps established accounting behavior only; they authorized no activation or chain mutation.
• Production still requires exact campaign/reserve manifests, retained historical membership authority, independently graded review and invalidation authority, and accepted production audit-canary evidence.

See Current status for the maintained evidence ledger and Settlement and weights for the operator flow.

Source anchors

• Legacy economics
• Reserved V2 schema
• V1 publication
• CLI