An evaluation system
for optimizer research.
Contributors propose an optimizer; the validator measures whether it trains the same model more effectively within the same compute budget.
One task, one budget, one number.
The frontier moves only when someone beats it, and it is checked twice before it moves.
Miners contribute optimizer source code. The validator evaluates submissions under a common contract and rewards confirmed advances over the best result so far. Each submission is bound to its author before evaluation begins.
Commit a hash
A miner publishes the SHA-256 of its optimizer source during the commit window and pays the round fee. The hash binds the submission before anyone can see it.
Reveal the source
After commits close, the source is revealed and must hash to the commitment. A static gate rejects anything that is not a plain torch update rule.
Train for twenty hours
A fresh B200 pod trains the production model on pinned data under a sandbox that cannot reach the network. The held-out loss is recomputed from the checkpoint by a process that never ran miner code.
Confirm, then pay
A submission that clears the bar is re-run once at the validator's cost. Only if the second run also clears it does the frontier move, and the worse of the two runs becomes the new bar.
Held-out loss at a fixed compute budget.
Every reward-bearing run gets the same model, the same data, the same compute budget and the same public seed. A slower optimizer does fewer steps inside the budget; a faster one cannot buy steps past the schedule horizon. The learning-rate schedule belongs to the submission.
Emission tracks verified progress.
No leader bonus, no winner-take-all. A network that stops improving burns more every two weeks.
Every confirmed frontier event carries a credit equal to its improvement in nats, halving every fourteen days. The round pays a share of emission equal to the sum of those credits divided by a full-pay reference, capped at one, and splits the paid part across every contributor pro rata to credit. The reference ramps from 0.03 nats at launch, where a single confirmed floor-clearing win pays in full, to 0.10 nats after eight weeks, where one floor-level improvement a week sustains full pay.
payable(t) = min(1, Σ crediti / R(t)) · (1 − burn floor)
weighti = payable · crediti / Σ credit
burn = 1 − payable
R ramps 0.03 → 0.10 nats over 56 days; g in nats of held-out loss
The rule is linear in improvement below the cap, so splitting a discovery into pieces, or submitting it from many hotkeys, earns exactly what the discovery is worth and nothing more. The launch burn floor is 0% from day one: the full miner pool is eligible for verified progress. After six weeks, we will review results and discuss a possible pause; none is scheduled automatically. The dashboard publishes actual settlement.