News·Opentensor Blog·Aug 20, 2024, 01:29 UTC

Child Hotkeys

This article describes child hotkeys, a new Bittensor feature. With this feature, a hotkey can delegate a portion or all of its stake TAO to one or more hotkeys. The hotkey that is the source of the stake is called parent hotkey and the hotkey that receives stake is called child hotkey. There can be more than one child hotkey for a parent hotkey. Similarly, a child hotkey can have more than one parent hotkey. Motivation The child hotkey feature is motivated by the following two problems: Delegate hotkeys are quite often stored on computers that can be hacked. When a delegate hotkey belonging to a subnet validator is compromised, then this exposes this compromised delegate hotkey in all the subnets. In fact, an attacker can get hold of the delegate hotkey from any one subnet in order to take over all the validation operations with this hotkey, thereby crippling this subnet validator in all their subnets across the entire Bittensor network. A subnet validator may want to validate on several subnets but may run into practical limitations. Properly setting weights on all these subnets can be time-consuming and may not be scalable, hence some validators might resort to weight copying. To address the above problems, the child hotkeys feature represents a further level of decentralization: Decentralization of the responsibilities of a single hotkey into a group of hotkeys composed of parent and child hotkeys. We decentralize the responsibility of subnet validation by spreading stake TAO to multiple child hotkeys. A separate child hotkey is used to validate on each subnet. This new level of decentralization builds upon the current decentralization of digital commodity production centers into subnets, decentralization of production tasks into subnet miners, decentralization of task verification into subnet validators, and decentralization of governance through tokens. Example Consider a parent hotkey that assigns its stake to two child hotkeys, and each child hotkey is contr

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