Guides

Governance

The root network, sudo and the Triumvirate, and the planned collective system.

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Bittensor governance runs through the root network (netuid 0) and, operationally, through sudo: privileged operations (runtime upgrades, protocol changes) are dispatched through sudo, held by the Triumvirate — a multisig of three Opentensor Foundation keys.

The root network

Registration on root is stake-based, not burn-based: root-register joins a hotkey, and placement depends on the stake behind it — root slots are limited, so joining a full root network evicts the member with the least stake.

Root stake also earns cross-subnet dividends; see Staking for claiming.

Voting

There is no on-chain voting today. The legacy senate-vote extrinsic — and the collective and membership pallets behind it — have been removed from the runtime, so top root members no longer form a voting senate. Privileged operations run through sudo held by the Triumvirate; the collective system below remains designed but undeployed.

Root claims

Configure how root dividends pay out with set-root-claim-type and collect them with claim-root.

The planned collective system

A two-stage collective governance system is designed but not deployed on mainnet as of mid-2026 — sudo remains the operative mechanism. As designed:

  1. Triumvirate stage: the three members have 7 days to vote; 2-of-3 ayes advance a proposal, 2-of-3 nays or timeout rejects it. The Triumvirate would no longer hold sudo directly — it becomes just the first referendum stage.
  2. Review stage: the combined Economic and Building collectives vote during a delay that starts at 24 hours and stretches to 2 days as nay votes accumulate. At least 75% aye fast-tracks execution to the next block; at least 51% nay cancels the proposal. Absent a blocking nay majority, the proposal is enacted automatically when the delay ends — enact-by-default, not approve-to-pass.

Proposals could only be submitted by a curated Proposers group of roughly 20 community members. The review-stage electorate is the deduplicated union of 16 Building seats (top subnet owners) and 16 Economic seats (top root validators) — at most 32 voters.

The reviewing collectives rotate every 60 days: Economic seats go to the top coldkeys by a stake EMA (fed from root-network registrations), Building seats to the top subnet-owner coldkeys by their best subnet's moving price. Until those collectives are populated, the review stage adds no check on the Triumvirate.