Beta tokens

Beta (β) is a share of one validator’s basket.

A basket is a small fund that validator runs on the root network. The fund holds subnet tokens — and sometimes plain TAO. You do not own “the SN4 tokens.” You own a slice of the whole pile.

Beta is not a new coin. It is not TAO. It is not alpha. It is a count of shares in that one fund. For how to buy, curate, and claim, see Root Reborn.

The basket holds real tokens. Beta is how you split ownership of that pile. Alice owns 40 of 100 shares, so a claim pays her 40% of whatever the pile is worth in TAO.

In the basket

Subnet 4 tokens

some α

Subnet 8 tokens

some α

TAO cash

held 1:1

Worth 120 τ if sold today.

Who owns it

Alice

40 β

Bob

60 β

100 β in total. Price is 1.2 τ per β. Alice’s claim is 48 τ.

What the number means

Say a fund has 100 β out, and you hold 40 β. You own 40% of everything in it.

If the stuff in the fund is worth 120 TAO today, your slice is worth 48 TAO. If those subnet tokens go up tomorrow, you still have 40 β. The TAO value is just higher.

That is the whole point of the unit:

• Your β count stays still when prices move. It goes up when the fund gives you more shares (a dividend, or a buy). It goes down when you claim.
• Your TAO value is your β × (fund value / all β). That number moves with the market.

A new fund starts at 1 TAO per β. After that the price is just “how did this fund do.”

Each validator is a different fund

Alice’s β and Bob’s β are not the same thing. Adding them is like adding shares of two companies.

If you want one number you can compare, use TAO — the wallet calls it beta_value. Do not add the β counts.

The index, and why prices get normalized

Raw price is fund value / all β. A new fund starts at 1.0. An old fund that lived through a bull market can show 4.0 forever — not because the validator is four times as good, but because it started from a different number. Those two prices are not comparable.

The basket index is the average of all live funds, weighted by size (NAV). It starts at 1.0 on a fixed start block. Deposits and withdrawals do not move it. Only whether the holdings themselves went up or down does. btcli root list uses this line as “the market.”

Normalization splices each fund onto that line the day it is born, the way a new share class of a mutual fund launches at today’s NAV instead of at $1:

• A baseline is stamped at the fund’s first share mint: raw price that block / index level that block. Since v450 the chain stamps and stores this itself, and both sides of that division use realizable quotes — what selling would actually fetch, bounded by pool depth — so nobody can poison a baseline by briefly pumping a thin pool’s spot price.
• Display price is raw price / baseline. A new fund starts on the index, not at 1.0.
• Display β is your β × baseline, so display β × display price is still your TAO value. Nothing about the claim changes.

vs index is then simple: display price over the current index, minus one. On the line means “did what the average basket did,” whether the fund is three days or three years old. Above the line means it beat the market.

This is display only — the chain still prices and redeems at raw value / β — but the convention itself is now defined by the chain, not by each wallet: the runtime computes the index, every fund’s display price, and each staker’s display β, and serves them over the betaBasket RPCs. btcli, explorers, and contracts all show the same number because they all read the same one.

Two lifecycle details. A brand-new fund prices provisionally — pinned to today’s index — only until its first share mint stamps the real baseline. And a baseline lives exactly as long as its fund: if every share is claimed out, the baseline retires with it, and a later revival starts a fresh life with a fresh stamp instead of inheriting a stale one.

Yield, on the same line

The bag index answers “how did the holdings do.” Root stakers earn a second stream — dividends minted as new β — and that gets its own line: the stake index, the wealth of τ1 of root stake earning the average fund’s dividends. Each fund’s staker yield (what τ1 staked there earned since its birth) and stake price (that yield spliced onto the stake index) come from the same chain RPCs, so “which fund paid its stakers best” is as canonical as the price itself.

How you get beta, and how you get TAO back

Two ways in:

1. Stake TAO on root with a validator. Each epoch, that validator’s root yield goes into its basket. You get more β in proportion to your root stake.
2. Buy in now with stake-into-basket (btcli root allocate). You pay TAO, the fund buys holdings, and you get β immediately. You pay the entry slippage.

A claim (claim-root-with-hotkey, btcli root claim) sells your slice of the pile and stakes the TAO onto your root. It does not land in your free balance. Unstake from netuid 0 after that if you want cash.

Nothing auto-claims. Unclaimed β just sits there.

A few sharp edges

• The chain stores a raw share count. Wallets divide by 10⁹ so that 1 β started at 1 TAO. Same trick as rao → TAO.
• A Balance printed as β can mean subnet 2’s token. That is unrelated. Basket beta is the share count in this page.
• You can look up a position with basket-position. beta is the count. value_tao is what a claim would pay right now.