Conviction Explained
Mainnet · takeover active
Bittensor rewards people who commit to a subnet for the long haul. Conviction is how the chain measures that commitment. This page explains how it actually works today, in everyday language.
The one-sentence summary: You lock your alpha tokens, and over time you earn conviction — a kind of long-term stake score that grows the longer your tokens stay locked. Conviction reaches half your locked amount in about 30 days.
On every Bittensor subnet, alpha tokens are the local currency. Anyone can buy them, sell them, hold them. But holding alone doesn't really say anything about your commitment to that subnet. A trader could hold for an hour and a believer could hold for a year — to the chain they look identical.
Conviction fixes that. When you lock your alpha to a particular subnet, the chain starts a clock. The longer your tokens stay locked, the more conviction you build. Conviction is what the chain looks at when it decides:
Think of it like seasoning a cast-iron pan. You don't get a great pan in a day. You earn it through repeated use over many months. Conviction is the same: it doesn't matter how much you spend; what matters is how long you commit.
You build it by calling a single action on chain that says "lock this amount of my alpha to this subnet". From that moment forward, three things start happening:
Heads up — the default is decaying, not perpetual. If you lock without opting into perpetual, your locked amount and your conviction will both start fading away. To build durable long-term conviction, you have to explicitly switch to perpetual mode.
Imagine you lock 10,000 alpha to a subnet and you opt into perpetual mode right away. Your locked amount stays at 10,000. Your conviction grows like this:
| Time elapsed | Conviction (of 10,000) | % of locked amount |
|---|---|---|
| Day 0 | 0 | 0% |
| 1 week | ~1,490 | ~15% |
| 1 month (half-life) | ~5,050 | ~50% |
| 3 months | ~8,790 | ~88% |
| 6 months | ~9,850 | ~98.5% |
| 1 year | ~10,000 | ~99.98% |
You never quite reach 100%, but after about six months you're effectively there. The curve is steady and predictable — there's nothing the subnet owner or anyone else can do to slow you down.
Same 10,000 alpha lock, but this time you leave the default settings alone. Now both your locked amount and your conviction are on a downward path. Your locked amount halves every 90 days. Your conviction rises at first, then follows the locked amount down.
| Time elapsed | Locked amount | Conviction | What you can withdraw |
|---|---|---|---|
| Day 0 | 10,000 | 0 | 0 |
| 1 month | ~7,910 | ~4,440 | ~2,090 |
| ~10 weeks | ~5,770 | ~5,770 (peak) | ~4,230 |
| 3 months | ~4,950 | ~5,610 | ~5,050 |
| 6 months | ~2,450 | ~3,460 | ~7,550 |
| 1 year | ~600 | ~900 | ~9,400 |
Decaying-mode conviction actually rises for the first ~10 weeks, peaks around day 71, then fades back to zero alongside your locked amount. So you do get a useful conviction window in decaying mode — it just doesn't last. Perpetual mode is the right choice when you want to matter on that subnet over the long term; decaying mode is the right choice when you want the option to walk away.
There's one shortcut. If you lock your alpha to the subnet owner's hotkey instead of any other hotkey on the network, your conviction is granted instantly, equal to your locked amount. No maturity wait.
It works for anyone, not just the owner. This is the chain's way of saying: lining up behind the person who built the subnet is the highest-conviction signal you can send, and you don't need to prove it through time.
If you lock to anyone else's hotkey, you're on the normal curve — about a month for half, about six months for nearly full.
Subnet owners don't get any starting alpha when their subnet launches. They have to build conviction the same way everyone else does. There's one mechanism designed to help them:
This switch is off by default. Only a small minority of subnets have turned it on; the conviction table shows which ones in its snapshot.
The whole conviction system points toward one goal: a mechanism the chain calls the subnet king. The idea is straightforward — if a subnet is more than a year old, and someone other than the current owner has built up enough conviction on their own hotkey, they take over as the subnet's new owner. This is live on mainnet.
There are guardrails before a takeover can happen:
The bar is per hotkey. Other people's conviction on the subnet, including the current owner's, never counts towards a challenger's 18%. Coalitions still work: backers lock directly to the challenger's hotkey, so their conviction lands on that hotkey.
Locking with perpetual mode is how you turn a position into governance weight. After about six months, your conviction is close to your full locked amount. You don't have to do anything — just leave it.
If you lock and forget, the default decaying mode quietly drains your lock. After six months only about a quarter is still locked, and your conviction falls with it. It's not punitive, just gravity.
Anyone locking to your hotkey gives you instant conviction credit. Cultivating that base is the closest thing Bittensor has to "lining up behind the founder."
Conviction matures with a 30-day half-life; decaying locks unlock with a 90-day half-life. The owner cut is 18% by default. Auto-lock is off on most subnets. A challenger takes ownership once their own hotkey clears 18% of eligible alpha in conviction, leads the owner, and the subnet is over a year old.
Only the decayed portion. If you're in decaying mode, anything that's already wound down can be withdrawn freely. If you're in perpetual mode, you have to switch back to decaying first and wait for the decay clock to release your alpha. There's no fast unlock.
No — you get one lock per subnet, pointed at one hotkey. You can change which hotkey you point at, but you can't split.
You can add more alpha to your existing lock anytime, as long as you're still pointing at the same hotkey. The new alpha starts its own conviction clock from zero — your earlier alpha keeps its accrued conviction.
No. Locks are tied to the subnet they were created on. To use your alpha on a different subnet you'd need to unlock, withdraw, and start fresh there.
Not directly. You get instant conviction, which adds to the owner's hotkey and helps defend their ownership. It doesn't give you direct say. If you ever wanted to challenge for ownership yourself, you'd be locking to your own hotkey on the same subnet, not the owner's — and your own hotkey's conviction is what has to clear the 18% bar.
The full mechanical reference — storage layouts, extrinsic names, code paths, decay formulas — lives at taostats.io/docs/concepts/conviction. That page covers the implementation. This page covers what it means.