Subnet Owner Cut

Subnet Owner Cut
Parameter	SubnetOwnerCut
Value	~18% (global)
Paid as	Staked alpha
Pending storage	PendingOwnerCut
Example	netuid 1
Set by	Root

Subnet owner cut is a network parameter, listed in the documentation as SubnetOwnerCut, that sets the ratio of a subnet’s alpha emissions given to the subnet owner as stake. The reference describes it as global and fixed at 18%, set at root permission (Subnet Hyperparameters, Emission).

What It Controls

The owner cut is the slice of each subnet’s alpha emission reserved for the subnet owner before the rest is distributed. The documentation breaks the per-tempo alpha distribution down as 18% to the subnet owner, with the remainder going to validators as dividends and miners as incentives (Emission).

The cut is deducted before the validator and miner distributions, not after. The coinbase computes the owner cut first and subtracts it from the alpha to be distributed, so the remaining roughly 82% is what flows to validators and miners through Yuma Consensus (Coinbase Implementation, Yuma Consensus).

The cut is paid as staked alpha on the subnet rather than as liquid TAO. Receiving the share as alpha ties the owner’s payout to the subnet’s own token, so its value tracks how the subnet performs rather than being a fixed TAO amount (Emission, Glossary: Protocol Alpha).

Per-Subnet Accrual in Pending Owner Cut

Although the 18% ratio is global, the accrued owner emission is held per subnet before payout. The coinbase accumulates each subnet’s owner cut into a PendingOwnerCut entry keyed by netuid every block of the tempo, then releases it when that subnet’s epoch completes (Coinbase Implementation).

That keying is why the owner’s pending balance is inspected for one netuid at a time. For the documented example netuid 1 on Finney mainnet, the PendingOwnerCut entry for netuid 1 holds the owner cut accrued so far in the current tempo and resets after the epoch drains it, so reading that entry shows how much owner emission is queued for that specific subnet rather than a network total (Coinbase Implementation, Emission).

Relationship to the Owner Cut Toggles

Subnet owner cut sets the size of the cut; two separate per-subnet flags govern its handling, both exposed in get_subnet_hyperparams_v3 (Subnet Hyperparameters).

Owner cut enabled — when set to false, the owner cut is not distributed at all; defaults to true.
Owner cut auto lock enabled — when true, the distributed cut is added to the owner’s conviction lock each epoch; when false, it is received as free stake with no auto-locking.

These flags decide whether and how the owner receives the share, while subnet owner cut fixes how large the share is (Subnet Hyperparameters).

Documented Value and Setter

The Subnet Hyperparameters reference describes SubnetOwnerCut as global and fixed at 18%, changed through the sudo_set_subnet_owner_cut extrinsic at root permission. Because it is global rather than per-subnet, the same cut ratio applies across subnets rather than being tuned by individual owners (Subnet Hyperparameters).

The constants reference exposes the startup value through api.consts.subtensorModule.initialSubnetOwnerCut, listed as 11796. That raw runtime value should be read alongside the hyperparameter documentation’s percentage wording: the reader-facing owner cut is 18%, while the constants table shows the encoded initial value used by the runtime (Subtensor Constants: initialSubnetOwnerCut, Subnet Hyperparameters).