How Empect works, role by role

What Empect is

Empect is a deal network for Bittensor subnets. A subnet owner publishes a term sheet: how much TAO they are raising, over what term, and what they give for it, measured in a share of their owner emission and, for OTC options, a discount to the pool price. Investors price that sheet on the subnet's live chain data, express interest or counter, and both sides sign the agreed terms with their coldkeys. Where a term is locked, the owner parks collateral with an escrow, who holds it in their own coldkey.

Three rules shape everything else.

• Nothing moves through Empect. Every transfer, from collateral to payouts, is made between the parties' own coldkeys with their own tools, usually btcli. Empect never holds a key or an asset.
• Nothing is taken on anyone's word. Empect watches the Bittensor chain and advances a deal only when it sees the expected transfer in the chain's own events: the right sender, the right receiver, the right subnet, the right amount.
• Which subnets are raising is private. Visitors without an account see no term sheets. Owners decide which signed-in investors may see theirs. Other owners never see another subnet's sheet.

Three roles use the platform: subnet owners, investors and escrows. One coldkey, or one Discord account for escrows, is one account, and a browser can hold one session per role at the same time.

Signing with your coldkey

Owners and investors never type a password. Each sign-up and sign-in is a short challenge that you sign offline with your coldkey. The signature proves control of the address and moves nothing.

1. On the sign-up or sign-in page, enter your coldkey address and press Get a challenge to sign. The page shows the exact text and a ready btcli command.
2. Run that command on the machine that holds your wallet. It looks like this, with your wallet name in place of the placeholder:

btcli wallet sign --wallet <your-wallet-name> --message "Empect
Purpose: sign in as investor
Address: 5F3s…
Nonce: …
Issued: 2026-11-06T12:00:00Z
This signature only proves control of the address. It moves no funds."

3. btcli asks for your coldkey password and prints signed_message, a long hexadecimal string. Paste it into the signature box and continue.

A challenge is valid for ten minutes and can be used once. One changed character in the message makes the signature invalid, so copy the command rather than retyping it. The same mechanism signs a term sheet once both sides have agreed, and it is how an escrow links the coldkey that will hold collateral.

Both sr25519 and ed25519 coldkeys are accepted. The signature is checked on the server against the address; nothing about your wallet is stored beyond the address itself.

For subnet owners

Signing up

Choose Subnet owner, enter your subnet's netuid and the coldkey that the chain lists as that subnet's owner, and sign the challenge. Empect reads the owner from the chain and refuses any other key. Every later sign-in repeats that check, so a subnet that changes hands follows its new owner.

Onboarding shows your coldkey card and lets you link a Discord account, which appears as a badge to investors. Nothing else is required; your ownership is already proven on chain.

My subnet

Your dashboard shows the subnet's live pool (TAO in, alpha in, price), owner emission per day, the staking yield estimate, a history chart that grows from the day the subnet was first read, the state of your term sheet, open interest and running deals, and a ring of how much of your owner emission is already committed by active and pending deals.

The term sheet

The editor at Term sheet has five parts.

1. Size and term. The smallest and largest deal you accept, in TAO, and the lock range in years for locked options.
2. Options. Four instruments you can switch on or off. Stake: the investor stakes TAO into your subnet and keeps it liquid; you give a share of your owner emission. Stake and lock: the same, locked for the term, with a larger share and collateral behind it. OTC: you sell the investor alpha below pool price; a share is optional. OTC and lock: OTC with a lock, a deeper discount, a larger share and collateral.
3. What you give, by amount. One row per tier. A tier starts at an amount and sets, for each option, the share of your owner emission per 1,000 τ and the OTC discount. The share scales with the deal: at 2.5% per 1,000 τ, a 2,500 τ deal gets 6.25% of your emission. Add a tier to give better terms from a larger size. The right-hand panel shows what an investor would see at 2,500 τ.
4. Collateral and escrow. Per option, whether collateral is required and for how many months of the owner share; locked options always carry it, and the minimum is three months. Any collateral needs an escrow chosen from the directory, where each escrow shows its fee and history.
5. Visibility. Public means every signed-in investor except coldkeys on your block list. Private means only investors who meet your conditions (a minimum TAO balance read from the chain, a completed deal on the platform) plus your allow list. The block list always wins.

You can also state how much alpha you have available for OTC and leave notes. Save keeps a draft; Publish makes it visible under your rules; Pause hides it again. Each save bumps the version, and a deal always records the version it was made on.

Interest and negotiation

When an investor expresses interest you see it under Deals, with the investor's coldkey, their Discord badge if linked, and a link to as much of their profile as their own visibility rules allow. You accept, counter (share and, for OTC, discount) or decline; the turn passes to the other side after each move. Messages stay on the deal's record.

After acceptance

Both sides sign the term-sheet text, which names the deal, the option, the amount, the term, what you give, the collateral and the escrow's coldkey. Then the deal page tells you, step by step, what to send from your coldkey and gives the btcli command: collateral to the escrow first if the option carries it, and later, for OTC, the alpha to the investor. Payouts are simply transfers of alpha from your coldkey to the investor's on your subnet, as often as you like; each one is seen on chain and recorded. At term end either side closes the deal and the escrow returns the collateral to you.

For investors

Signing up

Choose Investor, enter your coldkey and sign the challenge. The coldkey must hold at least 500 τ, free or staked at spot value, read from the chain at sign-up. Nothing is required later: your coldkey is your account.

Onboarding asks what you are looking for and who may see your profile, and lets you link Discord, X and Telegram.

What you are looking for

Category (stake, OTC or either), whether you accept a lock, the terms in years, your size range, the minimum share per 1,000 τ and minimum OTC discount you expect, and whether you want collateral and a known escrow. Term sheets that fit are marked Matches your wishlist on the Offers page, and owners who may see your profile see the match before they reach out.

Who can see your profile

Public: every subnet owner. Selected owners: only the owners of subnets you list. Conditional: owners whose subnet has at least a given pool size, or who have completed a deal. Private: nobody except your allow list. A block list of owner coldkeys always wins. Parties to a deal with you always see your profile.

Offers

The Offers page lists every published term sheet you are allowed to see, priced at a size and term you choose, with the subnet's live pool and emission. Nothing on it is visible without an account, and a sheet you cannot see does not exist for you.

Pricing a term sheet

Open a sheet to price its options on live chain data. You set the amount and the term, and a scenario: staking yield in year one and its decline per year, the alpha price and the TAO price at exit, how much TAO the pool gains per year, and whether owner distributions are restaked. Base, Bull and Bear presets are a starting point. Each option card shows the alpha bought (through the pool or OTC at the discount), the share of owner emission in alpha per day, yield, distributions, the exit price impact of selling back, and the net return in TAO and in USD. These are scenarios, not promises.

Expressing interest

Pick an option and press Express interest to request the published terms, or Counter these terms to propose a different share or discount. The owner accepts, counters or declines; you can do the same on your turn, or withdraw. You may hold one open deal per option per subnet.

Funding and payouts

After both signatures, the deal page tells you exactly what to send and from where. For stake options you stake your TAO into the subnet from your coldkey, with the btcli stake add command shown; Empect expects roughly the alpha the pool would give for your amount and confirms it from the chain. For OTC you send the TAO to the owner's coldkey and the owner sends you the alpha; both legs are confirmed from the chain. Alongside the funding you send the platform fee, 0.10% of the amount in TAO, to Empect's coldkey; the command is on the same page. From then on every alpha transfer from the owner to you on that subnet is a payout, recorded as it lands. The deal page keeps a running account: expected to date from the agreed share and the live emission, paid, outstanding.

Claims

If an option carries collateral and thirty days pass without a payout while something is outstanding, you can claim the outstanding amount, up to the collateral, from the escrow. The escrow pays it from their coldkey; the chain confirms it.

For escrows

Signing up

Escrows sign up and sign in with Discord, because Discord is how owners and investors reach them. Discord itself confirms the account; nothing is typed, and an account can belong to one escrow only. Right after, in onboarding, you name the coldkey that will hold collateral and prove it with one signed challenge. Empect then reviews the account; only escrows with a linked coldkey and Empect's approval appear in the directory owners choose from. The badge on your desk and profile shows where you stand.

Your fee

Two ways to charge, shown to owners when they pick an escrow. Alpha: a rate in basis points on the alpha collateral you hold, with a minimum in alpha per deal. TAO: a rate on the investment amount, with a minimum in TAO. The fee is a figure on the record; settling it is between you and the owner.

The escrow desk

Your desk sorts the deals that name you into queues: Awaiting owner (collateral expected, not yet seen on chain), Holding (collateral confirmed, deal funding or active), Claims (an investor has claimed; you pay from the collateral), To release (the deal closed; return the collateral to the owner) and Done. Each deal page shows the exact transfer expected of you with its btcli command, and the chain evidence once it lands. You never negotiate terms and never end a deal.

Your record

Your public profile shows deals served, collateral held, releases and claims paid, and your fee, so owners can choose on evidence.

A deal, step by step

Collateral has its own states: awaiting on chain, partly seen, held by escrow, claim open, paid to investor, returned to owner.

How chain confirmation works

A watcher on the Empect server keeps its own connection to the Bittensor chain and scans every block for the events that matter: balance transfers, stake added, and stake moved between coldkeys. For each deal it knows what is expected at the current stage: the kind of movement, the sender, the receiver, the subnet and the amount.

• Only events from the block at which the stage started count, so an old transfer cannot be reused.
• Amounts add up, so a transfer in two parts shows as progress and completes the stage once the sum reaches the expected figure. A tolerance of about ten percent absorbs fees and price movement; more than expected still completes the stage.
• Each observation is keyed by block, extrinsic and event, so nothing is counted twice.
• The deal page shows From, To, Amount and Seen on chain for the pending step, the watcher's position, and every matching event under Chain evidence with links to the block explorer.

Check the chain now runs the scan for one deal immediately instead of waiting for the next pass. A party may also leave a hint, a transaction hash or a note; hints appear in the timeline and never change a deal's status. Nobody, including Empect, can mark a transfer as done by hand.

Who sees what

• Visitors see the landing page, totals across all open term sheets (count, options, collateral coverage, size range) and nothing that names a subnet or an account.
• Investors see the term sheets whose visibility rules they meet, the profiles of owners whose sheets they may see or share a deal with, and the escrow directory.
• Owners see their own sheet and subnet, the investors who expressed interest, and the profiles of investors whose visibility rules they meet. Never another subnet's sheet.
• Escrows see only the sheets and deals that name them.
• Profile pages answer the same way whether or not an account exists when the viewer is not allowed to see it, so accounts cannot be enumerated from coldkeys.

Fees

Empect charges one fee: 0.10% of the deal amount, paid in TAO by the investor when the deal is funded. It is named in the term-sheet text both sides sign, it appears on the deal page as one more transfer with its btcli command, it goes from the investor's coldkey to Empect's coldkey, and it is confirmed from the chain like every other transfer. A deal becomes active once the funding and the fee are both seen. Listing, pricing, negotiating and the record itself are free; the fee is already taken off every net return the pricing pages show.

Escrows set their own fee, shown on their directory entry and on each term sheet that names them, and settle it with the owner directly. Chain transaction fees are the parties' own.

Glossary

Coldkey

The Bittensor wallet key that holds funds and signs. Your coldkey address is your account.

Owner emission

The share of a subnet's emission that goes to its owner, in alpha per day. Term sheets give investors a share of it.

Share per 1,000 τ

The percentage of owner emission given for each 1,000 τ of a deal; it scales with the amount.

OTC

Buying alpha directly from the owner at a discount to the pool price, instead of through the pool.

Lock

A commitment to hold the position for the term. Locked options carry collateral.

Collateral

Alpha the owner parks with an escrow for a number of months of the owner share, which an investor can claim after thirty days without a payout.

Escrow

An independent party, reachable on Discord, who holds collateral in their own coldkey and pays claims or returns it when the deal closes.

Term sheet

An owner's published offer: size, term, options, shares, discounts, collateral, escrow and visibility.

Questions about these terms or about a specific page are best asked from the page itself: every deal page states what it expects next and from whom. See also the terms of service and the privacy policy.