Skip to main content

Wallets and Keys

An AETRON wallet is a pair of cryptographic keys with different jobs: a coldkey for ownership and funds, and one or more hotkeys for day-to-day network operations. Splitting the two means your long-term holdings stay protected even while a hotkey is in constant use on a server.

Coldkey​

The coldkey is your main key. It owns your AET and authorizes anything sensitive.

  • Holds and transfers AET.
  • Manages staking (delegating, unstaking, moving stake).
  • Signs registration and deregistration, and pays the burn and the collateral.
  • Owns a Neuronet, if you run one.
  • Receives mining emission. Rewards are credited to the coldkey bound to the miner, not to the hotkey that did the work.

Keep the coldkey in cold storage and use it only to sign important actions. It can be paired with several hotkeys, including several in the same task if you run several cards.

Hotkey​

The hotkey is the working identity of a miner. It lives on the machine that does the work.

  • Signs work submissions: artifacts, verdicts, Pulse commitments.
  • Identifies the miner inside a task. One hotkey serves exactly one task.
  • Holds the X25519 key used to open sealed prompts.

A hotkey does not hold your money and does not receive rewards, so an exposed hotkey costs you the machine and its reputation, not your balance. It still needs a small AET balance of its own to pay transaction fees on the work it submits.

How the Two Are Bound​

The link is made at registration. The coldkey signs burned_register and names the hotkey as an argument, and the hotkey signs a short proof that it agrees to be registered under that coldkey. Without that proof anyone could name your hotkey in their own registration and lock you out of it permanently, since a hotkey can only be registered once.

The proof is a signature by the hotkey over blake2_256("AETRON-PoI:hotkey-registration:v1" || coldkey || hotkey || neuronet_id || task_id). The reference client builds it for you. Whether the chain insists on it is governed by a flag that currently differs between the two public networks, so a client that always sends it works everywhere.

swap_hotkey rotates the working key later while keeping the membership and the reputation attached to it.

Wallet Structure​

AETRON Wallet
├── Coldkey (ownership, funds, staking)
│   ├── Hold and transfer AET
│   ├── Delegate and unstake
│   ├── Register and deregister miners, pay the burn
│   └── Receive emission (paid in AET)
└── Hotkeys (operational)
    ├── Sign artifacts, verdicts and Pulse
    ├── One hotkey per task
    └── Hold the X25519 key for sealed prompts

Emission is paid in AET, not in any per-Neuronet token. There is no separate currency to convert.

How to Access a Wallet​

  • Any wallet that speaks the generic Substrate format works, since AETRON uses SS58 prefix 42: Polkadot.js, Talisman, SubWallet, and the AETRON extension.
  • Programmatic access through the chain's API for scripts and miner software.

End users of an AI service built on AETRON do not need a wallet at all: they interact with the Owner's product, and the wallet only matters for participants who own, mine, or stake.

Security​

  • Protect your seed phrase. It restores the wallet, so never share it. Write it down and keep copies in separate safe places, and avoid storing it as a photo or plain file.
  • Use separate hotkeys. A dedicated hotkey per machine limits the damage if one is exposed, and a coldkey may hold several of them in the same task.
  • Keep the coldkey off the mining host. The miner never needs it: it stores the coldkey's address for display and on-chain queries, nothing more. When registration has to be signed by a coldkey that lives elsewhere, the client prints the extrinsic parameters for you to sign in your own wallet.
  • Keep the minimum balance. An account must hold at least the existential deposit, 500 planck (a planck is the chain's smallest unit, one billionth of an AET), to stay on chain; below it the account is reaped. It is a tiny amount, set to discourage dust spam.

Good key hygiene is the foundation of safe participation: the coldkey guards what you own, the hotkey does the work.

Last updated on