Root Claim: Overview
The Root Claim feature in Bittensor allows stakers who stake to validators on the Root Subnet (a.k.a. Subnet Zero) to choose whether their staking dividends will accumulate as alpha, or be converted immediately to TAO.
- In Swap mode (default), the alpha is automatically converted to TAO at the current alpha-to-TAO rate and restaked on the root subnet.
- In Keep mode, the earned alpha accumulates on the subnet(s) that generated it.
This design creates flexibility for stakers. Choosing Swap favors long-term TAO accumulation and minimum risk, while Keep favors remaining invested in subnets and therefore maximizing possible reward while accepting some risk, due to fluctuation of token values.
The initial TAO staked to the validator remain staked on root in both modes. Only the alpha dividends from subnets are treated differently.
Dividends are divided between TAO and alpha based on Root Proportion
Claiming dividends
There are two ways to process claims:
- Automatic Claims: Each block, the blockchain selects accounts to claim rewards. Auto-claims happen randomly—roughly once every two days per account.
- Manual Claims: You can trigger a claim at any time using the
claim_root()extrinsic and specifying the subnets you want to claim alpha dividends from, specifying up to five subnets to claim alpha dividends from.
Your configured Keep or Swap setting is applied automatically to both manual and automatic claims. To change this, you must call the set_root_claim_type extrinsic.
See Managing Root Claims.
Automatic claims are only processed when the accumulated alpha dividends exceed the minimum threshold of 500,000 RAO (0.0005 TAO equivalent). This prevents small, frequent transactions from increasing network load. The threshold is configurable per subnet by the subnet owner or root via the sudo_set_root_claim_threshold extrinsic.
Root claim swaps (when using Swap mode) do not count as TAO outflows for the purpose of subnet flow-based emissions calculations. This means claiming and converting alpha dividends to TAO does not negatively impact a subnet's emission allocation.
See Emissions: Exceptions to Inflows/Outflows for details.