Refinery

A deliberately minimal, local-only Bittensor subnet whose only job is to generate genuine, verifiable validator↔miner traffic on a local subtensor — so we can exercise and test the tooling we build around subnets (Pylon, the Nexus validator runtime, observability, weight setting, deployment scripts, logging). It is not meant for testnet or mainnet and has no economic value.

Origin: rendered from the Nexus subnet template. The validator runs on the Nexus framework.

What the subnet does

A trivial, trustless proof-of-work game:

1. Each block, the validator sends a miner a challenge: a random seed and a difficulty — find a nonce such that SHA-256(seed || nonce) has at least difficulty leading zero bits.
2. The miner brute-forces the nonce and returns it.
3. The validator verifies any answer with a single hash (ground truth is mathematical, never secret).
4. Each epoch, the validator weighs miners by correctness (the gate) and speed (a bounded bonus), so faster, reliable miners earn more — and slow miners that miss the deadline collapse to zero weight.

The single load knob is difficulty: low (8–12) ≈ near-instant "ping" traffic; high (24+) ≈ sustained, observable CPU load. The full mechanism design lives in subnet_design.md.

Repository layout

• validator/ — the Nexus-based validator (the production code; PoW challenge → miner → verify → weigh).
• miner/ — a simple brute-force test-fixture miner with a configurable response delay (MINER_RESPONSE_DELAY_S) for simulating slow miners. Local-only; never a production miner.
• localnet/ — local subtensor + Pylon + bootstrap + miner fixtures for end-to-end runs.
• installer/, envs/deployed/, .github/workflows/ — operator install, deployed compose, and CI (inherited from the template; kept for completeness).

Running it locally

See localnet/README.md for the end-to-end dev environment (subtensor + Pylon + validator + miners). Validator configuration and the VALIDATOR_* knobs are documented in validator/README.md.

Development

Two independent uv projects — run uv sync inside validator/ or miner/ before working on either. QA gates per project: uv run ruff check, uv run basedpyright, uv run pytest.