Question 1

How often does Zeus issue new forecasting challenges?

Accepted Answer

Zeus issues forecasting challenges four times per day at 00:30, 06:30, 12:30, and 18:30 UTC. Each round can include multiple challenges—one for each combination of ERA5 variable (2m temperature, 100m u-wind, 100m v-wind, surface solar radiation) and forecast horizon (49 hours for short-term or 361 hours / 15 days for long-term).

Question 2

What geographic area and resolution do miners need to forecast?

Accepted Answer

Miners forecast the entire Earth using a 0.25-degree grid, resulting in 721 latitude × 1440 longitude points. All forecasts use hourly time steps, and the full grid layout is always the same regardless of variable or horizon.

Question 3

How are miners scored and ranked on forecast accuracy?

Accepted Answer

Once ERA5 ground truth becomes available (typically days after a challenge ends), validators compute RMSE and MAE between each miner's committed forecast and the actual data. The final score is (RMSE + MAE) / 2, with latitude-based area weighting and geographic scalars applied (1.0 baseline, 1.5 for Europe, 2.5 for Germany). Miners are ranked by this score; validators use rolling averages of recent ranks to calculate subnet weights and set miner incentives.

Question 4

What is the commit-reveal mechanism and why does it matter?

Accepted Answer

Miners commit a SHA256 hash of their compressed forecast on-chain before the hash window closes (minute :45 of the challenge hour). Later, validators request full predictions and verify that the SHA256(compressed_bytes + miner_hotkey) matches the on-chain commitment. This prevents relay mining—miners cannot copy another's answer after seeing it—and allows trustless verification of forecast quality.

Question 5

Can I run a miner without a GPU?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Miners do not require a GPU for inference while running the network node. A GPU is recommended for model training, but once a trained forecasting model is ready, it can run on CPU (minimum 4 cores @ 2.5 GHz, 16 GB RAM, SSD storage) as long as predictions are precomputed before each challenge window.

Question 6

What are the minimum compute requirements for validators?

Accepted Answer

Validators require a minimum of 2 CPU cores @ 2.5 GHz, 8 GB RAM, and 100 GB SSD storage. No GPU is needed. Network bandwidth should be at least 100 Mbps download and 20 Mbps upload. A local Subtensor node is strongly recommended to minimize outages.

Zeus

Zeus

Hardware Requirements

Hardware Requirements

Miner Setup

Validator Setup

Participate

Participate

Hardware Requirements

Hardware Requirements

Miner Setup

Validator Setup