Incentive Mechanism

The Sportstensor incentive mechanism represents a breakthrough in aligning network rewards with genuine predictive value. Unlike traditional sports prediction systems that can be vulnerable to variance-based strategies or short-term manipulation, our architecture implements a sophisticated multi-layer reward function designed to identify and reward sustained intelligence.

The reward distribution follows a carefully calibrated emission schedule that:

• Prioritizes long-term contribution over short-term variance

• Implements adaptive difficulty adjustment based on network-wide performance

• Features built-in protection against coordinate gaming attempts

• Rewards consistent edge discovery over high-variance strategies

For miners, this creates a uniquely attractive proposition: deploy your models with complete IP protection, build a verified track record of performance, and earn rewards proportional to your predictive value. The mechanism's transparent nature ensures that rewards flow to those contributing genuine intelligence, while its game-theoretic design maintains the network's long-term sustainability.

Miner and Validator Functionality

Miner

Miners in the Sportstensor network are prediction engines - autonomous systems that receive queries and return win probabilities. The framework is deliberately agnostic to implementation details, allowing miners complete freedom in how they generate their predictions.

The miner's core interaction loop is simple:

1. Receive standardized match queries from validators

2. Generate win probabilities through their proprietary prediction system

3. Return probability predictions within the required latency window

Miners must return two key pieces of information when responding to prediction requests:

1. probabilityChoice: The predicted outcome (Home team, Away team, Draw).

2. probability: The probability for that outcome, as a float between 0 and 1. e.g. 0.6 represents 60% probability.

Miners who provide incorrectly formatted responses or fail to respond are penalized.

Validator

Validators are the cornerstone of Sportstensor's distributed consensus architecture, orchestrating the network's prediction lifecycle and maintaining its integrity through a sophisticated synchronization and scoring protocol.

• Match Syncing: The validator operates in an endless loop, syncing match data every 30 minutes. This includes checking upcoming, in-progress, and completed games.

• League Commitment: Validators send requests every 15 minutes to acquire the active league a miner is committed to. Miners are required to respond with predictions for all matches in their committed league or receive a penalty. Miners who fail to commit to one league will be incrementally penalized until committing or deregistering.

• Match Prediction Requests: Prediction requests are sent out at specific time intervals (24 hours, 12 hours, 4 hours, and 10 minutes before a match).

• Edge Scoring: After match completion, the validator calculates the edge scores for each prediction and updates the local database to be used later in the scoring and weights logic.

edge = consensus_closing_odds - (1 / prediction_prob)

• Prediction Cleanup: Non-registered miners and outdated predictions are regularly cleaned from the system to ensure only valid data is kept.