Let's be honest: btcli is a pain. It was built for miners and technical subnet owners, people who live in a terminal. Everyone else gets a wall of flags, a password prompt and a nagging voice in the back of their head asking "am I doing this right?" With your bag on the line.
Plenty of today's subnet owners aren't Bittensor natives at all. Founders, researchers and companies now run subnets without ever wanting to touch dozens of hyperparameter flags, and the tooling never caught up with them. It's been a target too: in July 2024, a malicious release of the Bittensor package on PyPI stole private keys and drained around $8 million in TAO from users' wallets.
We all just want to get it done, and keep our wallets safe.
- Meet Taostats Actions
- Staking without the guesswork
- Keep your wallet safe with multisig and proxies
- Key swaps: the scariest transaction on the network
- Validators: settings you touch once a year
- Subnet owners: 51 settings, zero flags
- Have a complicated multi-step transaction?
Taostats Actions turns every transaction you'd normally run through btcli into a simple web form. Find what you want to do. Fill it in. Check it. Sign with your wallet. Done.
There's no terminal and no package to install, and it's non-custodial: your keys stay in your Bittensor wallet, and taostats never receives your seed phrase. Every action ends on a review screen showing the exact on-chain call and the estimated fee. For anything that swaps through a subnet pool, it also shows your maximum slippage and lets you turn on MEV Shield, which encrypts your transaction until it's in a block so bots can't front-run it. Nothing is submitted until you sign. If you know the chain, nothing is hidden. If you don't, you can still check everything before you commit.
Actions is included in every paid taostats Pro plan, starting from $9 per month.
Staking is the thing everyone does, so it's where most mistakes happen. Wrong hotkey. Wrong subnet. Amount in the wrong token.
So the forms pick from what's actually on chain. Your hotkeys and the validators you already stake with are in a list, not a blank box waiting for you to paste the wrong address. Amounts are clearly labelled in TAO or the subnet's alpha, and when you stake or unstake TAO through a pool, you set a maximum slippage. If the price moves past it, the chain refuses the swap rather than filling you badly.
Everything else in Bittensor staking works the same way, one form each: switch validators, move stake between subnets, transfer stake to another wallet, set auto-stake (handy for miners), claim root emissions and lock stake for conviction.
The best ways to protect serious TAO on Bittensor are multisigs and proxies, and they've also been among the most painful to use. Bittensor's own docs say any valuable coldkey should sit behind a multisig, so the tools need to be easy. Both are front and centre in Actions.
A multisig needs more than one signer to approve a transaction, say two of three, so no single lost or stolen key can move the funds. In Actions you can create or import a multisig, start a transaction, and approve or cancel the ones waiting on you. Taostats finds them for you.
A proxy lets another wallet act for yours, within limits you set. Keep your main coldkey offline and use a separate wallet for staking. Add, remove or create a pure proxy in a couple of clicks. Already have one? Set up the transaction, then run it with the proxy wallet instead.
A coldkey swap moves everything your coldkey controls to a new one. You usually need it at the worst possible moment, when you think a key has been compromised. That's not the time to learn a CLI.
Actions walks you through it. Announce the swap, wait out the delay of about five days, then execute it with the same new address. If you see a swap on your coldkey that you didn't start, you can challenge it, and if you've changed your mind, you can cancel. Every step warns you in plain words about what it does and whether it can be undone. Hotkey swaps are there too, keeping your stake and network identity attached to the new key.
Child keys, childkey take and validator take are the settings nobody remembers the command for, because you only change them occasionally. Now they're forms. Set Take even works out whether you're raising or lowering your take and picks the right call for you.
This is the one we're proudest of. Running a subnet shouldn't require being a Bittensor engineer, and every hyperparameter you used to look up in a doc and type into a terminal is now a labelled field with an explanation underneath.
- Register a subnet with its identity in one form, with the current registration cost read live from the chain
- Start emissions and change your owner hotkey
- Tune hyperparameters: registration burns, immunity period, max UIDs, tempo, commit-reveal, Yuma3, liquid alpha and mechanism counts
- Turn on owner cut or buy and burn, or fund a leased subnet with a crowdloan
- Set your subnet identity and symbol, and recycle or burn alpha
Generate the hex of the transaction and paste it into BYO (Bring Your Own Transaction). Review it on the same screen as every other action, add MEV Shield if it might be attacked on chain, and sign. Taostats submits it for you.
For most things, no. Changing a setting, swapping a key, moving your stake or approving a multisig transaction can all be done in taostats Actions without a terminal. If you're automating transactions or running scripts on a server, the Bittensor Python SDK is the tool built for that.
Stop wondering "am I doing this right?"
Open Taostats Actions and do it properly, without the terminal. Not on Pro yet? Plans start from $9 per month.
Taostats is the block explorer and data analytics platform for Bittensor. It provides real-time and historical data on every subnet, validator, miner, block, account and transfer, alongside tools to stake, swap and move TAO, track a portfolio across wallets and export tax reports. Taostats is available on the web, as a free iOS and Android app and as a non-custodial browser wallet. Staking, swapping and transferring TAO through taostats comes with zero fees. For developers, taostats offers the leading Bittensor API, and taostats Pro adds higher limits and advanced tools for active holders, power users and teams.
