Three months after launching its first version, Basilica (Subnet 39 on Bittensor) is rethinking what decentralized compute should look like on Bittensor.
The team behind the project shared an in-depth update on Covenant Labs’ TGIF Community Call, outlining a bold new direction focused on efficiency, sustainability, and smarter incentives for miners.
For Basilica, its mission remains to make decentralized compute practical, scalable, and competitive. But the team now believes that achieving this requires more than just distributing idle compute; it requires rethinking how miners, data centers, and users interact within the network.
Learning from the First Phase
When Basilica first launched, it modeled its infrastructure after existing compute networks like Lium, which the team believed was the closest fit for Bittensor at the time. But after three months of experimentation, it became clear that this setup was holding them back.
“The model was too limiting,” the team explained. “It made us focus on short-term issues instead of building toward our long-term vision.”
The challenge was margin pressure. Many decentralized compute networks rely on middlemen (miners or brokers who simply resell compute from providers like DataCrunch) which makes it nearly impossible to achieve sustainable profits. Basilica decided that had to change.
The Problem with Idle Compute
One of the biggest insights from Basilica’s early phase was that paying miners for idle compute simply doesn’t make sense. It drains emissions without creating value.
“We’re not paying anyone just to park their compute,” the team stated. “No serious Web2 or Web3 company does that. It’s wasteful.”
Instead, miners will now be rewarded for delivering competitive, high-quality compute at the best possible price. This change turns miners from passive participants into active contributors (what the team calls “asset managers” of the network’s compute capacity).
Dual Marketplaces for Better Efficiency
The new Basilica architecture introduces two compute marketplaces:
a. Community Marketplace
Powered by miner-provided compute, where miners compete to offer the best performance and pricing.
b. Provider Marketplace
Sourced directly from professional data centers and infrastructure partners.
If a miner’s performance or price cannot compete with a provider’s, they don’t earn. It’s a merit-based structure that aligns incentives with efficiency, pushing the network toward real-world competitiveness.
Miners will now be paid directly in $TAO, with Basilica retaining a small portion (roughly 10%) for token buybacks to support long-term ecosystem growth.
Moving Toward a Job Platform
While rental-based compute was Basilica’s starting point, it was never the end goal. The team is now developing a job-based architecture; a platform that allows developers to offload tasks like model training, inference, or data evaluation directly onto the network.
As Evan, one of Basilica’s engineers, explained “The idea is simple. Instead of renting entire servers, users can submit a job (say, an AI inference task) and Basilica executes it on demand. You only pay for what you use.”
This evolution brings Basilica closer to a function-as-a-service model, maximizing utilization while giving users access to scalable compute without long-term commitments.
The Path to Full Utilization
The new system also aims to eliminate underutilization, one of the biggest inefficiencies in current compute networks. By clustering and dynamically assigning workloads, Basilica ensures that hardware is always being used effectively.
“Maybe a user only needs a GPU for ten minutes,” Evan explained. “With our system, they can call the Basilica API, run the task, and pay only for those ten minutes.”
Future updates will add features like data persistence (so uploaded datasets don’t need to be re-synced) and cluster scaling for large tasks — from 8-GPU jobs to 16-GPU or more.
A Sustainable Economic Model
Financial sustainability is central to Basilica’s redesign. The new incentive structure drastically reduces unnecessary emissions, aligns miner rewards with productive output, and ties tokenomics directly to real demand.
90% of revenue will go to miners, while 10% will fund ongoing buybacks of Basilica’s subnet ‘$ALPHA’ token, creating a positive feedback loop that rewards efficiency and ecosystem growth.
Looking Ahead
The team emphasized that this update is more than a technical change, it’s a philosophical shift. Basilica wants to build a compute network that rewards contribution, not speculation.
“We’re entering a phase where efficiency matters,” the team concluded. “Miners, validators, and subnets all have to evolve. The goal isn’t just to survive, it’s to make decentralized compute better than any centralized alternative.”
With the upcoming release of its job platform and several subnets already in pilot testing, Basilica is positioning itself to lead the next generation of decentralized compute on Bittensor; one that’s faster, leaner, and built for real-world scale.
Useful Links
Official Website: https://www.basilica.ai/
X (Formerly Twitter): https://x.com/basilic_ai
Discord: https://discord.gg/fzRp7XcA
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