What Miners Do

Miners are the supply side of the Telegraph protocol. They expose AI capabilities — a Bittensor subnet, an open-source model, a hosted or proprietary API — through a standardized YAML interface and earn MACHINA whenever their responses are selected and used.

Telegraph started by integrating Bittensor subnets, which is why you'll still see subnet in some slugs and API fields. That naming is historical: today a miner is any provider integrated via YAML, subnet or not. Becoming one doesn't require permission, a whitelist, or a relationship with the Telegraph team — and there's no bond or stake to post. Anyone with an AI API can register.

How Miners Earn

Miners earn exclusively from demand — not from protocol emissions.

When an agent pays to use a miner's capability:

1. The agent pays the signal price in USDC.
2. 2% goes to the Protocol Treasury.
3. The remaining 98% enters a TWAP Settler escrow.
4. Over the next 24 hours, that USDC is dripped into Uniswap V3 to purchase MACHINA at market price.
5. The purchased MACHINA is sent to the miner's registered fee address.

The rate of dripping (0.01 USDC at a time, ±30 seconds jitter) prevents flash price manipulation. A minimum of 100 USDC must accumulate before a settlement cycle executes — earnings below this threshold roll over to the next epoch.

Your earnings per request: Earnings = min_price_usdc × demand_multiplier × 0.98 → MACHINA at market price

Signal Pricing

When you register as a miner, you declare a floor price (min_price_usdc). This is the minimum you'll receive per request — agents can't pay less. To change it later, call updateMiner with the new price — see Updating Your Miner. That deregisters the old entry and registers the new one atomically, so you get a new registrationId and a new intentId.

The actual price an agent pays may be higher based on how much demand exists for your Intent in the last 24 hours:

A miner charging 0.01 floor handling an Intent with 5,000 daily requests earns0.015 per call. At 500 requests per day attributable to that miner, daily earnings would be ~$7.50 worth of MACHINA.

How Routing Works

Not all miners receive equal traffic. Routing is probabilistic and weighted by leaderboard score:

• Top-ranked miner receives 70% of routed requests.
• Second-ranked receives 20%.
• Third-ranked receives 10%.

(These weights are governance-adjustable. At genesis they are 70/20/10.)

A miner's leaderboard position is determined by their Canonical Score — the stake-weighted median of all Validator Local Scores from the most recent epoch tournament and ongoing spot checks.

To earn more, perform better. There is no cap on the number of miners per Intent. The market determines which ones succeed.

The Grace Period

For the first 7 days after registration, a miner is in the grace period. During this time:

• The miner doesn't appear on the leaderboard (no score yet).
• All grace-period miners collectively share 5% of routed requests, distributed equally.
• This gives every new miner a baseline of traffic to build a track record.

After 7 days, the miner's score from the grace period is used to rank them on the leaderboard, and they begin competing for the weighted 70/20/10 distribution.

Spot Checks and Revocation

Validators run spot checks continuously throughout each epoch, on average about once per hour for each Intent (the node default), at randomised times. A spot check tests liveness, not answer quality: any non-empty answer passes. If a miner fails consecutive spot checks for an Intent (no response, or an empty answer):

• A Routing Revocation is issued immediately.
• The miner is removed from the routing table for that Intent.
• Their traffic share is redistributed to remaining eligible miners.
• The revocation is recorded immutably in the epoch block.

A revoked miner cannot receive new traffic until the next epoch tournament re-scores them. Maintaining consistent response quality is critical to income stability.

What You Need to Become a Miner

Current Active Miners (Testnet)

The live miner set changes as operators register and deregister on-chain, so there is no useful fixed list to publish here.

See the live set two ways:

• Interface: the Intelligence Terminal shows active miners and the signals they produce.
• API: GET https://devnode.telegraphprotocol.com/api/miners returns the current catalog with schemas and prices.

Next Steps

• YAML Configuration — how to write your miner's configuration file.
• Registering as a Miner — how to register on-chain and go live.