Question 1

How do storage miners earn rewards on Hippius?

Accepted Answer

Storage miners earn by pinning files requested through the marketplace. Rewards are calculated monthly based on byte-blocks (file size × days held), with the arion pallet reading current shard capacity, computing accrual since the last settlement, pricing at the marketplace rate, and settling payment through the bank pallet. Miner income is proportional to both capacity and uptime—idle or offline miners accrue no blocks.

Question 2

What is byte-block accrual and why does it matter?

Accepted Answer

Byte-blocks measure storage work as the integral of bytes held over time (bytes × elapsed blocks). This prevents payment for brief bursts; a miner pinning 1 GB for 1 day accrues 1 GB-day regardless of network clock speed. Monthly settlement reads final byte-block totals and prices them in fixed-point USD, then converts to token payouts—ensuring work is paid only once and proportionally to actual service duration.

Question 3

How are validator rewards distributed?

Accepted Answer

Validators earn from era payouts every 6 hours. The marketplace pallet routes revenue (storage requests, compute fees) to a payout pool. The staking pallet distributes 75% to active validators split equally across the session set (each validator gets the same amount, regardless of stake weight), and 25% to the treasury. Larger stake and longer tenure improves validator selection odds, but rewards are not directly pro-rata—this incentivizes decentralization.

Question 4

What role do offchain workers play in Hippius?

Accepted Answer

Offchain workers run on miners and validators to collect real-time system metrics (CPU, memory, GPU, disk health, bandwidth, file pin status, VM latency) and store them onchain. Validators use these metrics to verify miner performance and build reputation scores. The metrics are queryable via RPC API, so applications can monitor node health without trusting a centralized telemetry server.

Question 5

How does Hippius prevent sybil attacks or bad actors?

Accepted Answer

The network uses slashing (penalties for validator misbehavior), minimum validator stake, and reputation tracking via offchain metrics. Bad actors can be blacklisted or banned by validators. Additionally, the guardian-attested alpha-bridge ensures daily Bittensor emissions are only minted after observed escrow events—no quorum of signers can mint arbitrary tokens without cryptographic proof.

Question 6

Can I run a Hippius node with limited hardware?

Accepted Answer

Validator nodes require 4 CPU cores, 16 GB RAM, and 500 GB SSD with 100 Mbps bandwidth. Miner nodes have similar requirements but can operate with smaller storage capacity by pinning fewer files. Both can run in Docker containers for easier deployment and management.

Question 7

How does the alpha-bridge ensure daily emissions are legitimate?

Accepted Answer

Daily emissions accrue in a Bittensor multisig escrow hotkey. A proposer script computes the day's accrued amount and proposes a stake transfer; approver daemons (one per co-signer, running independently) verify the exact amount by querying finalized state and approve only on match. Once executed, guardians attest the event onchain; threshold attestation triggers settlement with per-day and global mint caps enforced. A single approver daemon refusing bad amounts blocks the entire flow.

Question 8

What happens if a storage miner goes offline?

Accepted Answer

Byte-block accrual stops when a miner is offline (no new blocks accumulate). When the miner comes back online, accrual resumes from the last recorded time. Files pinned by an offline miner may be replicated to other miners automatically via the marketplace's replication mechanism. The offchain worker metrics will show offline status, so validators and data consumers can observe degraded performance and replication events in real-time.

Question 9

How are compute VM requests priced and paid?

Accepted Answer

Compute requests are priced via the marketplace pallet with pro-rata settlement: the price is specified per-block or per-month, prorated on the first month if the request starts mid-month. Hypervisor miners earn rewards for running the VM until the request is completed or cancelled. Payment is drawn from the data consumer's marketplace credit balance and distributed to the hypervisor miner monthly via the arion pallet's settlement process.

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