SN 114: Our Side of the Story

TL;DR
We’re the new team behind subnet 114. We bought the slot only—not the sellers’ accumulated tokens. Per our agreement, they kept and later sold their emissions. A series of events (community speculation and a mistimed announcement) pushed price up right before their sale and right before our coldkey swap. They sold, received a large amount of TAO, and the optics looked terrible. We understand the frustration. We didn’t orchestrate the sale, didn’t profit from it, and we moved forward to build. This post explains the timeline, our choices, and what we’re doing to earn your trust.

Who We Are (and Why We Chose Gaming)

Before we formed Level 114, we were miners across multiple subnets. That vantage point let us see both what’s great about Bittensor and where it’s fragile: beginner-level mistakes in code in some subnets, exposed APIs, and vulnerabilities that only builders running real workloads tend to trip over.
We’ve shipped infrastructure for games before. Gaming was an untouched narrative on Bittensor, and the fit felt natural: real-time workloads, measurable outputs, and a big developer audience. That’s how the idea for a gaming subnet was born.

Why We Had to Buy a Slot (and What That Really Meant)

With the subnet cap at 128, launching meant acquiring an existing slot. Before the cap, slots changed hands around ~100 TAO; once secondary trading started, prices jumped into the hundreds (e.g., SN47 around ~650 TAO).
Slot pricing floats with root prop, liquidity, and other factors. Our best path was a newer slot with lower liquidity and higher root prop. After several conversations, SN114 was the most advantageous option. The prior team had explored a gambling-related project and, from what we understood, hit legal snags.
Crucially, the sellers also held a large number of tokens (from their 18% emissions as prior owners). Buying both the slot and their token stack would have:

• Made the total price unrealistic for us
• Likely forced us to sell later just to sustain operations

So we put it in the contract:

• We acquire only the slot, plus the 10,000 tokens strictly needed to run validator code
• The previous owners keep their past emissions and can sell them at their discretion

At the time, with alpha price levels, the expected proceeds from their sale didn’t look huge.

What Actually Happened (The Unfortunate Chain of Events)

• The prior team posted a message responding to an accusation (related to delisting).
• The community interpreted it in the worst possible way.
• Speculation kicked in and price climbed—hard—just before our coldkey swap.
• The sellers, seeing momentum, shifted their sale to Saturday.
• If they’d waited until Monday (when the changeover announcement had originally been planned), the sale might have landed differently. It's possible that the price has increased even more considering that during the weekend, most people are not online.
• They sold into a rising market and received a considerable amount of TAO. The community, understandably, was angry.

Key point: This sale was entirely their decision, explicitly allowed by our agreement. We couldn’t and didn’t control it.

What We Did—and Didn’t—Do

• ✅ We bought the slot under clear terms that excluded the sellers’ historical emissions.
• ❌ We did not coordinate their sale, front-run it, or benefit from it.
• ✅ We proceeded with the coldkey swap and the build plan we’d prepared for months.
• ❌ We didn’t attempt to manage perception with half-answers; we chose to ship and then explain fully.

What We Learned

1) Communication beats cleverness: even with a clean contract, the community needs the “why,” not just the “what.”
2) Timing matters: announcements, swaps, and liquidity events need guardrails—even when not all parties are under our control.
3) Assume speculation: if there’s an interpretive gap, the market will fill it.

What We’re Building on 114

We picked gaming because it’s where Bittensor incentives can be measured against real usage.

• Verifiable gameplay signals: Validators verify outcomes and integrity; miners serve the workloads that matter (match data, inference for NPCs, anti-cheat heuristics).
• Dev-first tooling: Lightweight SDKs + REST/gRPC so Unity/Unreal/engine-agnostic teams can integrate fast.
• Usage-aligned rewards: Rewards track active game sessions, not idle capacity.
• Security-first: Private audits before releases, followed by incentivized bug bounties.
• Performance transparency: Public dashboards for latency, uptime, and miner/validator health.

Concrete Commitments to the Community

• Clear separation of concerns: we operate the subnet; we don’t manage former owners’ treasury decisions.
• Runway, not reflex: avoid reactive token moves to narratives; build first.
• Regular updates: changelogs + short fortnightly notes (shipped, metrics, known issues, next).
• Open channels: office hours for miners, validators, and game devs.

FAQ

Q: Did Level 114 profit from the price spike?  
A: No. The sale belonged to the previous owners per our agreement. We received the slot plus 10,000 operational tokens—nothing more.

Q: Why not force a lockup on their tokens?  
A: Those were their historical emissions. Rewriting that would’ve killed the deal. We chose a clean separation: we take the slot; they retain their tokens.

Q: Couldn’t you have delayed the swap?  
A: Delaying wouldn’t have changed their right to sell; it would only add uncertainty and speculation.

Q: Why gaming?  
A: It’s an area where verifiable, low-latency, high-throughput AI/compute actually matters—and where incentives can be measured against real usage.

Q: How will we know you’re delivering?  
A: By code, dashboards, and shipped integrations. We’ll publish artifacts and metrics so you don’t have to take our word for it.

Closing

We acted in good faith within a structure that made sense at the time. A confusing message, a fast-moving market, and bad timing created a narrative we wouldn’t wish on anyone—but here we are, sleeves rolled up.

If you’re angry, we hear you. If you’re skeptical, you should be. Give us the chance to earn your trust the only way that matters here: by building something useful on 114, in the open, with security and performance you can verify.

— Level 114