The Opentensor Foundation just released a much underappreciated update to Bittensor: the addition of child hotkeys.

This feature allows hotkeys to set child hotkeys on specific subnets, and assign them a dedicated share of their stake.

Instead of having one main hotkey validating on all subnets, delegates are now able to split the stake they manage between multiple validators on each subnet. These validators could be run by the delegate itself, or by other independent validators.

The feature should have two positive effects on the network:

1. Decentralizing subnet validation. Smaller validators can now specialize on validating on specific subnets, while inheriting the stake of larger delegates. This will help smaller validators to validate, and should improve the quality of validation on subnets.
2. Improving validators’ security. Until now, a single hotkey had to validate on as many subnets as possible. If this hotkey was compromised, it impacted its validation on every subnets it was active on. This created a risk both for validators and for subnets. With child hotkeys, delegates will be able to use different keys for different subnets.

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Details

Nothing changes for TAO holders. You can keep delegating your TAO to your favorite delegates, or let Mentat Minds do it for you! It’s up to the delegates to set their children hotkeys.

Each hotkey can have 5 child hotkeys per subnet.