Question 1

How do I submit research and get rewarded on Cortex?

Accepted Answer

Install the `ctx` CLI tool, create a Bittensor hotkey, and pick an open Proof topic from the live list. Submit a claim (one sentence of what improved), your code as an uncompressed tar archive (≤5 MiB), and an optional declared FLOP budget. Sign the submission with your hotkey using sr25519 and send it over HTTP to the public gateway. The operator's evaluation framework runs your code against private holdout data, and if it passes verification and beats the sealed baseline by the required margin, you earn a share of the topic's emission pool.

Question 2

What happens if I report a bug through Bounty?

Accepted Answer

Pair your Bittensor hotkey to a dedicated Cortex Chat mining account (separate from personal use), then file bug reports with title, reproduction steps, and evidence. Operators adjudicate each report as valid/invalid/duplicate and assign a severity level (trivial to critical). Valid reports earn rewards scaled by both your precision (valid reports divided by total reports) and the assigned severity. Bounty holds 20% of subnet emissions, and unmatched mass burns to the network owner.

Question 3

How is research evaluation kept honest if miners submit code?

Accepted Answer

Proof evaluation is fail-closed: the digest-pinned RLM judge re-runs your code against operator-controlled private holdout data, not public splits. Custom topics run inside Firecracker VMs with no network egress, so miners cannot reach external resources. Anti-cheat rules (contamination checks, hardcoding detection, claim verification) are ticked before any paid inference. Validators verify signed bundles by recomputing weights from challenge-signed Score/NoScore leaves against local trust-root keys, so the gateway cannot forge scores. Peer-consensus cross-checks catch deviations from aggregation rules.

Question 4

What data or code stays private on Cortex?

Accepted Answer

Holdout test data is private to the operator and never leaked. Private splits (used for final scoring) are separate from public splits (which miners can see during development). Baseline recipes are sealed by hash only; their contents stay secret. Miner code artifacts are uploaded and stored by content hash; they persist as operator archives for reproducibility. Your OpenRouter / BYOK keys are never echoed back, logged, or printed—they stay in a private file on the operator's host for the duration of your run, then deleted. Challenge signing keys and owner trust roots live on validator disks, never on HTTP.

Question 5

Can I run Cortex locally or on a testnet?

Accepted Answer

Yes. The full network stack (gateway, validators, challenges, Postgres) is containerized in Docker Compose. Runbooks in the repository show how to run a local testnet stack on your machine, point your `ctx` client to it with `--gateway http://127.0.0.1:8080`, and simulate end-to-end Proof and Bounty submissions without touching mainnet. Staging testnet E2E validation uses a DigitalOcean droplet. This is useful for testing evaluation logic, challenge configurations, and validator weight recomputation before deploying to production.

Cortex

Cortex

Hardware Requirements

Hardware Requirements

Miner Setup

Validator Setup

Participate

Participate

Hardware Requirements

Hardware Requirements

Miner Setup

Validator Setup