Roles
Telegraph has four distinct participant roles. Each has different responsibilities, different earnings mechanics, and different requirements to participate.
Agent
An Agent is anything that consumes intelligence from the Telegraph network — a human using a terminal, an automated trading system, a smart contract, or another AI. No registration is required to be an Agent.
What Agents do:
- Submit inference requests for a specific Intent (e.g., a weather forecast, an LLM completion, a deepfake detection).
- Pay the signal price in USDC, either per-request via x402 or from a pre-funded escrow.
- Receive a finalized, validator-signed response.
How Agents pay:
- x402: An HTTP-native micropayment — the server returns a 402 with payment instructions, the agent signs and sends a USDC transaction, then retries. The whole flow happens without leaving the HTTP request cycle.
- Pre-funded escrow: Deposit USDC into the Diamond contract's EscrowFacet. Subsequent requests deduct from that balance automatically — no per-request transaction needed.
- On-chain job: For dApps, a smart contract creates a job on-chain by funding it with USDC. The result arrives via a callback.
Requirements: A wallet with USDC on Base (or Solana for Solana-side payments). No staking, no registration, no approval.
Miner
Miners supply compute. They expose an AI capability — a model, a Bittensor subnet, an API — through Telegraph's standardized YAML interface, register on-chain, and earn MACHINA whenever their responses are used.
What Miners do:
- Declare one or more Intents they can fulfill, along with their API endpoint and minimum price.
- Respond to inference requests routed to them by the protocol.
- Compete on quality — their responses are scored by Validators, and higher-scoring miners get more traffic.
How Miners earn: Miners earn MACHINA, but not from protocol emissions. The earning path is:
- An agent pays USDC for a request.
- 98% of that USDC enters the TWAP Settler.
- Over 24 hours, that USDC is used to purchase MACHINA from the open market (Uniswap V3).
- The purchased MACHINA is sent to the miner's registered fee address.
The amount a miner earns per request depends on their declared floor price and the demand multiplier active for that Intent.
Requirements:
- No bond or stake — registration costs gas and nothing else.
- A hosted YAML configuration describing your capabilities.
- An operational API endpoint compatible with the declared Intents.
- A fee address (EVM wallet) to receive MACHINA payouts.
For the full setup guide, see Registering as a Miner.
Validator
Validators are the protocol's neutral guarantors. They run the scoring engine, verify ground truth, participate in BFT consensus, and publish finalized signals. They do not handle payments, do not route requests, and do not choose which miners to use — their only job is honest evaluation.
What Validators do:
- Run a Telegraph node continuously (availability is critical — missed rounds result in lost emissions).
- Verify zkTLS proofs generated by the elected Leader.
- Execute the Canonical Script for each Intent to produce a Local Score.
- Participate in commit-reveal BFT consensus to arrive at the stake-weighted median Canonical Score.
- Submit signed epoch state roots on-chain.
How Validators earn: Validators earn 60% of daily MACHINA emissions, split equally among all active Validators. At genesis (7,200 MACHINA/day × 60% = 4,320 MACHINA/day ÷ 64 Validators = ~67.5 MACHINA per Validator per day). This halves every 4 years on the same schedule as total emissions.
Validators also earn a small gas reimbursement from the Treasury for each on-chain submission.
Requirements:
- Enough staked MACHINA to rank in the top-64 by total stake.
- A server with reliable uptime (missed rounds penalize emissions).
- Two keys: a cold Manager Key (for staking operations) and a hot Operator Key (for BFT participation).
- Running the Telegraph node binary.
Script Author
Script Authors write the WASM programs that define how miner responses are scored. They are the intelligence behind the evaluation layer.
What Script Authors do:
- Write a WASM scoring script for an Intent's tier: a comparator for a deterministic Intent, or a model-based adapter that judges answers for a judgment or hybrid Intent.
- Post the script on-chain. There is no bond or fee — submission costs gas only.
- A judgment or hybrid script competes with the current Canonical on a hidden sample from the Evaluation Pool. It becomes the new Canonical only if it beats the Canonical's win rate by the replacement margin and clears the minimum win rate. A comparator becomes Canonical only if it reproduces the reference comparison exactly. See Build an Evaluator Adapter.
How Script Authors earn: Script Authors earn 20% of daily MACHINA emissions via Hash-Math — proportional to how often their script's hash is used as the Canonical across all active Intents. A script that becomes Canonical for a high-volume Intent captures a significant share of this pool.
Requirements:
- No bond or fee — submission costs gas only.
- WASM binary running within protocol sandbox constraints (no filesystem access, no unrestricted network, only whitelisted URLs).
Delegator
Delegators are MACHINA holders who don't run a node but want to participate in the protocol's security and earn a share of emissions.
What Delegators do:
- Choose an active Validator and delegate MACHINA stake to them.
- Their stake increases the Validator's total staked MACHINA, helping that Validator stay ranked in the top-64 active set.
How Delegators earn: Validators set a commission rate (the share of their emissions they keep). Delegators earn a proportional share of the remaining emissions, claimable from the Port Contract at any time by pulling their accumulated balance.
Requirements: Any amount of MACHINA. No minimum. No lock-up (standard unbonding applies when withdrawing).