By: Senti
I actually watched Ridges’ session on Revenue Search, so I’ll break down 90 mins of the podcast in a 4-minute read about Sportstensor and their partnership with Polymarket.
If you are into Prediction Markets, especially if you trade them and have a good PnL, you will find this hella interesting.
What is Sportstensor, how do they make revenue and the role of miners.
A Bittensor subnet that incentivizes people to trade Prediction Markets through their platform. These people are their miners. Why do they trade through the platform instead of Polymarket itself?
So, Polymarket doesn’t charge any fees, Sportstensor charges 1%! The incentive is they take the revenue from their fee and give it back to “eligible” miners aka those who provide good, winning signals. And they give it back in the form of their alpha token which has its own potential upside.
Basically the deal is:
Are you good at predictions? Then trade through us and win additional money for just 1% fee of your bets.
It’s a good deal because you don’t only take money from other PM traders when you win but you collect part of the revenue that comes from other miners’ bets in their subnet token which today it’s worth ~7.5$.
Explanation of their buybacks
This is the part which I think can be confusing, when you see that “100% of revenue goes to buybacks”.
First of all you need to know that Bittensor gives emissions aka distributes the TAO produced every day to their subnets.
By default these emissions go to the contributors of a subnet as follows: 41% to miners, 41% to validators, 18% to owners.
What most ppl don’t know is that this can be tweaked.
In the case of Sportstensor the emissions miners are earning are strictly tied to their revenue; if their revenue on a day is 1K they distribute this amount worth of alpha tokens to miners.
This helps to not dilute the token and even more ensuring it goes to miners that have actually produced useful work which is what Bittensor is all about in the end.
(In practice, we’ve seen miners earn a lot of TAO for not really useful work, which dilutes both $TAO and alpha tokens value). So miners get emissions tied to the revenue—>this revenue goes into alpha token buybacks which increases their price—> here’s your flywheel.
What happens to the excess mining emissions that aren’t distributed? Not very clear answer here; they keep them for now and they’ll either burn them or use as additional incentives for contributors
Background and details of the partnership with Polymarket
Since they had a lot of volume, Polymarket approached them as they thought the subnet was a market maker. When the team explained to them the concept, Polymarket was hooked.
As mentioned, Polymarket doesn’t take fees so what they do care about is the TRUTH aka the winning volume in their markets, which is exactly the thing Sportstensor incentivizes.
So, they are gonna support them in terms of marketing but most importantly they give them a direct line of comms with their head of markets which means Sportstensor will be able to create markets themselves!
What comes next?
Sportstensor realized that they needed to make mining frictionless.
To open access to everyone who wants to trade at Polymarket and collect their share of emissions. This will also help Polymarket to get even more winning volume.
And they can also create markets in areas where other Bittensor Subnets are feasting like SN18, 50, 123 (you can find more details about those +ways to get exposure in my pinned article).
For example Zeus Subnet specializes on weather forecasts so Sportstensor could create additional weather markets for them. Right now they are developing their new Almanac platform, so if you wanna be a miner in a frictionless way sign up for their list by clicking the link on Almanac’s X bio.
Personally, I submitted and look forward to become a miner in a 2nd subnet after Nuance Subnet which incentivizes me to do good content about Bittensor more often, and maybe level up my PMs trading skills.
Polymarket airdrop exposure
If Polymarket drops the token, miners of the SN have already done a lot of volume so it makes sense they will get especially if they have a winning volume. Moreover the team has done half a million in volume so they will get a bunch of $POLY tokens probably which they want to distribute back to the alpha tokens holders!
Favorite moments in the podcast
● When the Subnet’s CEO Lucian talks about how he wanted to become miner in Bittensor a while ago so he purchased tokens of a project that promised to mine for him aaaand they rugged (sorry but was quite a unique rug story XD)
● When Mark Creaser , CEO of DSV fund, who was quiet for pretty much the whole first hour of the podcast and once he got asked if it made any sense, he proceeded to summarize everything very simple in just 2 minutes. I clipped that part! Find it below!
● When Neuro who’s their head of AI and designed the IM (Incentive Mechanism) drops this line in the beginning “AI is just statistics really in the end of the day” and in the end gives his flowers to Siam Kidd on how supportive he was when nobody gave a dime about them.
That was a really sweet moment, and generally props to everyone in the podcast; I don’t really consume videos and watched this on one go.
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