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Documentation Index

Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.pelion.dev/llms.txt

Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

Definitions for Pelion-specific and Bittensor-specific terms. Entries are organized alphabetically.

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A

Adapter. The Solidity contract on Base that accepts question submissions, escrows bonds, handles challenges, and fires callbacks to requesting contracts. Named PelionAdapter.sol. The public contract surface of the protocol. Alpha token. A subnet-specific token in Bittensor’s dynamic TAO (dTAO) system. Each subnet has its own alpha token with an automated market to TAO. Alpha prices reflect market opinion of the subnet’s value production. Axon. Bittensor’s server endpoint running on a miner. Receives queries from validators via the Dendrite client and returns responses. Pelion miners run an Axon that accepts PelionSynapse queries.

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B

Base. The Coinbase L2 blockchain where Pelion’s adapter, token, and reference market contracts are deployed. Chosen for low fees, EVM compatibility, and strong consumer user base. Backtest (in validator scoring). A question with known ground truth that a validator injects into the live query stream to measure miner accuracy. Miners don’t know which queries are backtests. Pelion’s v0 validator ships with a bundled set of 20 toy backtest questions. The production set comes from the Priority 1 benchmark harness dataset. Bittensor. A decentralized AI work marketplace. Subnets (sub-networks) specialize in particular tasks (forecasting, financial oracles, language modeling, etc.). Miners produce the subnet’s output; validators score miners’ work; TAO emissions flow per Yuma Consensus. Bond (requester bond). Capital posted by the requester at question submission time, escrowed by the adapter. Forfeited if the requester cancels or attempts to game the protocol. Bond (relayer bond). Capital posted by a relayer when submitting a verdict to Base. Forfeited if the verdict is successfully challenged.

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C

Challenge window. The time period during which anyone can submit a counter-verdict to a posted verdict, with a counter-bond. Scales with question stakes (1 to 6 hours). If no challenge is filed, the verdict finalizes automatically. Coldkey. A Bittensor wallet that holds stake and controls high-value operations. Typically kept offline or in cold storage. Distinct from a hotkey, which signs operational messages.

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D

Dendrite. Bittensor’s client for querying Axons. A validator’s Dendrite fans a request to all registered Axons on a subnet and collects responses. dTAO (dynamic TAO). Bittensor’s market-based emission allocation system. Live since February 2025. Replaced a centrally-allocated emission schedule with per-subnet alpha-token markets that determine emission flow.

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E

Escalation council. The Tier 3 governance body in Pelion. A randomly selected council of staked token holders that adjudicates disputed verdicts and UNRESOLVABLE escalations. Evidence policy. The rules bounding admissible evidence for a question. Allowed source categories, allowed domains, maximum evidence age, minimum source count. Carried on the Question schema.

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F

Frontier model. A state-of-the-art language model from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, or equivalent providers. Pelion’s frontier-model council uses Claude, GPT, and Gemini. Frontier-model council. Pelion’s synthetic resolver. A Python module that fans a question to multiple frontier language models in parallel and aggregates responses into a verdict. Serves as a fallback path and as the baseline against which the real Bittensor subnet is measured.

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H

Hotkey. An operational Bittensor keypair that signs queries, responses, and weight-setting transactions. Typically kept on the machine running the miner or validator. Less privileged than a coldkey.

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M

Metagraph. A Bittensor subnet’s registry of active hotkeys, their stakes, and their Axon endpoints. Validators and miners read the metagraph to know who is on the subnet and how much weight they have. Miner. A Bittensor subnet participant that produces the subnet’s digital commodity. For Pelion, a miner produces verdicts with evidence and reasoning when queried by validators.

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N

Netuid. An integer identifier for a Bittensor subnet. SN6 is netuid 6, SN28 is netuid 28, etc. Pelion uses netuid 0 as a sentinel for the synthetic frontier-model council (netuid 0 in Bittensor is the root subnet, not a workload subnet, so the sentinel does not collide).

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P

PelionSynapse. The Bittensor wire envelope for Pelion queries and responses. A subclass of bt.Synapse with inputs set by validators and outputs filled by miners.

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Q

Quadratic voting. A governance voting scheme where voting weight is the square root of token balance, not the balance itself. Dampens whale dominance while preserving some proportionality.

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R

Relayer. An off-chain service that carries verdicts from Bittensor to Base. Posts to the adapter with a bond; subject to permissionless challenge during the challenge window. Resolution. Post-event determination of what happened, for settlement purposes. Pelion’s core service. Router. An off-chain service that listens to Base adapter events, translates questions to Bittensor subnet queries, aggregates responses, and triggers relay.

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S

Subnet. An independent Bittensor sub-network with its own miners, validators, and incentive mechanism. Subnets specialize (forecasting, financial oracles, language modeling). Each subnet has its own alpha token under dTAO. Subtensor. The Bittensor chain. Substrate-based, with an EVM layer added to enable bridging to EVM chains.

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T

TAO. The native Bittensor token. 21 million supply cap. First halving December 2025. Timelock. A delay enforced on governance actions. Pelion’s Tier 1 changes have a 48-hour timelock; Tier 2 changes have variable-length timelocks depending on decision scope.

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U

UMA. The incumbent onchain adjudication protocol. Resolves disputed questions via token-weighted voting. Pelion’s structural competitor. Documented failure modes include whale dominance (the July 2025 Zelensky case study), reflexive consensus, and forced binary resolution. UNRESOLVABLE. A first-class verdict outcome in Pelion. Sentinel integer value -1. Returned when evidence is genuinely inconclusive. Propagates through the canonical Verdict, the Synapse wire, the adapter contract, and the requester callback.

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V

Validator (on a subnet). A Bittensor subnet participant that scores miners’ work and sets on-chain weights. Validators earn emissions in exchange for evaluation work. Pelion operates its own validator on its target subnets. Validator (in governance). Not used in this sense for Pelion. The term “validator” in Pelion documentation always refers to a Bittensor subnet validator. Verdict. The canonical output of a Pelion resolution. Contains outcome, confidence, evidence, reasoning, and subnet metadata. Hashed and stored on Base; full content pinned to IPFS.

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Y

Yuma Consensus. Bittensor’s algorithm for converting validator weight-setting into emissions. Implements a specific form of weighted-median consensus that resists small-scale manipulation.