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Provider Quickstart

Get started in 5 min​

Three steps to a live provider on Bittensor Subnet 51. Want to know how much you'll earn? See Rewards.

Security Notice

Run btcli on your secure local machine, not on the provider server. Only hotkeys belong on provider infrastructure — never your coldkey.

What GPU models can I bring to this subnet?​

The validator scores a fixed allow-list of NVIDIA models — Hopper / Blackwell datacenter (H100, H200, H800, B200, B300), Ampere & inference datacenter (A100, A10, T4, V100, P100, P40, M40), workstation (RTX 6000 / 5880 / 5000 Ada, RTX PRO 4000/5000/6000 Blackwell, RTX A-series, L4 / L40 / L40S, Quadro & TITAN), and consumer (full RTX 50/40/30/20-series and GTX 10/16-series). The complete list with per-model reward weight, the unrented-pool eligibility rule, and CVM-eligible GPUs lives in Architecture → Supported GPUs. The source-of-truth is GPU_MODEL_RATES in lium-io.

Before you start — wallet & TAO​

You need a Bittensor wallet (one coldkey + at least one hotkey) and enough TAO on the coldkey to cover the dynamic subnet 51 registration fee.

  • Don't have a wallet yet? Install btcli (pip install bittensor) and create one — see the Bittensor wallet docs for the wallet new_coldkey / new_hotkey flow.
  • Need TAO? Acquire it on a supported exchange and transfer it to your coldkey's SS58 address. The registration fee is dynamic — check the live cost on the TaoMarketCap Subnet 51 registration page before submitting (or run btcli subnet list --netuid 51).
  • Want to dry-run before burning the registration fee? Try Staging (Testnet) on Subnet 37 with free test TAO first.

Step 1 — Register your provider on Subnet 51​

btcli subnet register --netuid 51 --wallet.name <wallet> --wallet.hotkey <hotkey>

Registration burns the dynamic subnet 51 fee from your coldkey balance. The transaction either confirms (your hotkey now has a UID on subnet 51) or fails (insufficient TAO, or the burn cost spiked between command issue and chain inclusion).

Step 2 — Sign in to the Provider Portal​

  1. Add your provider hotkey to a supported wallet extension. Any SS58-compatible browser extension works — common choices are the Polkadot.js extension and the Bittensor Wallet extension.
  2. Sign in at provider.lium.io/signature-login with that hotkey.
  3. Open Profile → Central Provider → select Lium.io Central Provider Server.

This opt-in lets Lium operate the CPU coordinator for you, so you can skip the self-hosted provider setup. Prefer to run your own? See Provider Configuration for the self-hosted path.

Step 3 — Set up your first node​

A provider with no GPU nodes earns nothing. Bring one online with the Node Quickstart — three steps: install Sysbox (required — validators reject any node without the sysbox-runc runtime), run the one-line mine.sh installer, and register the node back in the Provider Portal.

You're live 🎉

"Live" vs "earning"

Being live means the provider is registered and the node is reachable. Earning starts after validators score your node — the first validator probe cycle takes roughly 15 minutes, and meaningful rental revenue depends on actual customer rentals matching your GPU type and price. Track scoring in the Provider Portal monitoring view and emission externally on TaoMarketCap.

Next steps​