Cacheon SN14 gives its newest lineage champion an 80% reward floor

Cacheon SN14 has merged an emissions-policy change that gives the newest crowned claim at least 80% of its lineage’s pooled decayed credit.

The same pull request moves settlement to every validation pass, including the intake-only mode used by the project’s production deployment. Cacheon says both changes were deployed and verified on mainnet on August 30.

That status is project-reported. Tao Outsider confirmed the merged code and documentation but did not independently decode the referenced block or reproduce the weight publication.

The mechanism is also narrower than an 80% share of the subnet. The floor applies inside one lineage pool. It does not enlarge that pool, take credit from unrelated lineages or create a universal winner-take-all system.

Settlement moves outside the qualification service

Cacheon’s pull request describes a mismatch in its previous production path. The deployment runs chain-validate --intake-only because qualification happens on a remote worker. Settlement had been nested under a condition requiring a local service, so retained passing pairs could remain unsettled.

PR 104 moves settlement to the service-independent end of each pass. Cacheon says the step retains its existing fail-closed controls, including checks for an active qualification lease, finalized economic ordering and agreement between the stored stack and the commit-time state.

In practical terms, a retained passing pair should no longer wait for a separate manual crown procedure merely because the validator is operating in intake-only mode.

This is code and operator documentation from Cacheon. It does not independently establish production reliability or prove that every later pass settles correctly under failure conditions.

How the 80% champion floor works

The new policy is labeled cacheon.emissions.v1.1.

Cacheon groups related claims into a lineage when they share a target across arena generations. Their decayed credit forms a lineage pool. Under the new policy, the newest crowned claim receives at least 800,000 parts per million, or 80%, of that pool. Displaced crowns divide the remainder proportionally.

The pool total remains unchanged. If a lineage has 100 units of pooled credit, the newest champion receives at least 80 of those units. Older crowns can share up to 20. The rule does not turn 100 units into a larger number and does not change the pools belonging to other lineages.

That design pays the miner that displaced the previous champion sooner than the earlier decay-only path. The old champion can still retain a smaller share rather than falling automatically to zero.

An 80% floor therefore creates a strong local advantage without making the mechanism winner-take-all.

The chain-confirmation claim

Cacheon says the first vector produced under the champion floor was uids=[209,144] with weights=[0.2,0.8] at block 8956054. The pull request records the projection identifier beginning 31c99b07 and marks chain_matches=True.

That is useful implementation evidence, but its provenance matters. The deployment and chain-confirmation statements come from Cacheon. Tao Outsider has not decoded block 8,956,054 against the policy, rebuilt the projection or checked the complete validator state that produced it.

The article therefore treats the block as a Cacheon-reported confirmation rather than an independent chain finding.

Pre-release software with three active miners

Cacheon’s repository labels the software pre-release. A September 1 TaoSwap snapshot showed three active miners on SN14 and an emission_value of 0.003765826.

Three active miners do not establish broad participation or decentralization. The snapshot also says nothing about inference throughput, customer use, revenue, SGLang performance or the quality of crowned claims.

The update is material because it changes when retained work settles and how one lineage distributes its existing credit after a new champion appears. The next proof should come from repeatable weight publications, more than one lineage and outside verification that settlement behaves as documented across ordinary and failure cases.