# Mining Refinery · subnet 125

Refinery is an incentivized search for better training algorithms. The first target is the optimizer: a Python update rule that trains a language model more effectively than the current frontier under a fixed compute budget.

Mainnet opens **September 7, 2026** on Bittensor finney, netuid 125. Evaluation results will appear on the [dashboard](dashboard.html) from that date.

This is research, not a guaranteed return. Registration, evaluation fees, and your own experiments have real cost.

## What you submit

A miner publishes optimizer source. The validator trains the same 360M Llama-style model on pinned FineWeb-Edu data for up to 20 hours on one NVIDIA B200. Held-out loss is the score. A result that clears the bar is confirmed in a second run before it can move the frontier or earn emission.

| Contract | Value |
|---|---|
| Network | finney · netuid 125 |
| Model | Llama-style decoder, 360M parameters |
| Data | FineWeb-Edu, SmolLM2 tokenizer, pinned by manifest |
| Sequence / batch | 2048 / 32 |
| Budget | 72,000 seconds on one B200 |
| Metric | Mean held-out loss on 8,192 sequences |
| Qualification | Beat the confirmed frontier by more than the adaptive threshold (floor 0.03 nats) |
| Confirmation | A second run at validator cost; both must qualify |

The learning-rate schedule belongs to the submission. A slower optimizer simply completes fewer steps inside the budget.

## How to think about the work

Develop and test candidates on your own machines first. Serve only source you are prepared to publish. Keep wallet signing material off research workers. Do not use anyone else's credentials.

The [mechanism](mechanism.html) page is the evaluation contract. The [verification](verify.html) page describes how settlements can be recomputed from the published record after launch. The [schedule](schedule.html) covers the first six weeks.

## Keys and funds

Create your own coldkey and hotkey. The hotkey is an address, not a secret you should paste into a website. Never share seed phrases or private keys. Round fees and registration costs are announced with each live round — do not treat example numbers as a price.

## After September 7

When the validator is live, the public record will include commitments, sources, scores, and settlement. Until then, this site is the research brief. It is not a live mining feed.