Validator Roles & Incentives

Validators function as FlameWire's quality-control oracle, measuring miner performance and determining who deserves what share of the daily ALPHA emissions.

Primary Responsibilities

Validators must:

• Probe miners for uptime, correctness, and latency
• Aggregate scores into a weight vector
• Publish weights on-chain via set_weights transactions (rate-limited to one call every ~20 minutes per Bittensor rules)

Earnings Structure

Capital Requirements

No minimum bond exists to operate a validator, though voting power scales with locked ALPHA. Hardware costs depend on your validation strategy:

Accuracy Incentives

The network flags validators whose weights diverge significantly from the median consensus as potentially noisy or malicious, risking:

• Reduced reputation visibility
• Potential future slashing in governance upgrades

Getting Started

Step 1: Install Prerequisites

Ensure you have the following installed on your system:

• Minimum hardware: 4 vCPU, 8 GB RAM, 80 GB storage
• Python 3.10+ — Required for running the validator
• Node.js 18+ — Required for pm2 process manager
• Access to an archive Bittensor node for REFERENCE_RPC_URL

Step 2: Clone the Repository

git clone https://github.com/unitone-labs/FlameWire.git
cd FlameWire

Step 3: Create Virtual Environment

python3 -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate

Step 4: Install Dependencies

pip install -r requirements.txt
pip install -e .
npm install -g pm2

Step 5: Verify Validator Identity

To obtain your validator API key, you must verify ownership of your validator hotkey. Navigate to the validators page:

Validators

Sign the Verification Message

Copy the command shown in the modal and run it to sign the message:

btcli w sign --wallet.name [name] --wallet.hotkey [hotkey] --use-hotkey --message verify-validator

Replace the placeholders with your actual values:

• [name] — Your wallet name
• [hotkey] — Your hotkey name

Example:

btcli w sign --wallet.name my_wallet --wallet.hotkey my_hotkey --use-hotkey --message verify-validator

Complete the Verification

After running the command, enter the following in the modal:

1. Hotkey Address — Your Bittensor hotkey address (starts with 5)
2. Signature — The signature output from the btcli command

Click Verify Identity to complete the verification. If your hotkey is registered as a validator on the subnet, you'll receive the validator role.

Step 6: Create Validator API Key

After receiving the validator role, navigate to the API Keys page to create your validator API key:

API Keys

Enter a Name for your API key (e.g., "Production Validator"), ensure the Validator role is selected, and click Create Key.

Step 7: Configure Environment

Copy the example environment file and populate it with your credentials:

cp .env.example .env

Required environment variables:

• WALLET_NAME — Your Bittensor wallet name
• WALLET_HOTKEY — Your hotkey name
• SUBTENSOR_NETWORK — Subtensor endpoint (default: wss://entrypoint-finney.opentensor.ai:443)
• REFERENCE_RPC_URL — Archive reference RPC for truth checks (use your own node when possible, fallback: wss://archive.chain.opentensor.ai:443)
• GATEWAY_URL — FlameWire gateway URL
• VALIDATOR_API_KEY — Your validator API key from Step 6
• VALIDATOR_MAX_WORKERS — Number of parallel workers (default: 32)
• VALIDATOR_EMA_ALPHA — EMA smoothing factor (default: 0.1)
• VALIDATOR_VERIFICATION_INTERVAL — Verification interval in seconds (default: 480)
• WANDB_API_KEY — Weights & Biases API key (get from wandb.ai/authorize)

REFERENCE_RPC_URL=wss://archive.chain.opentensor.ai:443

Step 8: Start the Validator

pm2 start neurons/validator.py --name flamewire-validator --interpreter python3

Step 9: Monitor Operations

# Monitor in real-time
pm2 monit

# View logs
pm2 logs flamewire-validator

# Restart if needed
pm2 restart flamewire-validator