Almanac is Bittensor subnet 41 (SN41), a project in the Sports Analytics and Prediction lane. Sports signals, priced by real Polymarket trades.
Almanac (formerly Sportstensor) turns sports prediction into a verifiable trade. Miners place real positions on Polymarket through a proxy wallet, and validators score them by what their bets actually paid out.
It is an educational deep dive, not a recommendation to stake. For live price, pool depth, and performance, always open the live subnet page.
What is Almanac (SN41)?
Almanac is a Bittensor subnet that incentivizes accurate sports prediction by routing miner trades through Polymarket's central limit order book. Instead of submitting model outputs that someone has to verify, miners take real positions on real markets, and the on-chain outcome of those trades is the score.
In plain English: It is like a fantasy league where the prizes are paid by how much money your picks would have won, except the picks are real bets on real markets.
Centralized reference points: Polymarket, copy-trading sportsbooks, traditional pick-selling services
How miners and validators work
Like every Bittensor subnet, SN41 is a two-sided market: miners produce work, validators score it, and emissions follow those weights under the network’s dTAO economics.
- Miners trade on the Almanac dApp, which routes orders through a proxy wallet to Polymarket's CLOB. Every fill becomes a scored signal.
- Validators sync miner metadata from chain, ingest each miner's rolling trading history, run a two-phase scoring optimization on ROI and qualified volume, and set on-chain weights.
Mechanism and design
According to the project README and TAO.app documentation, miners generate signals by placing orders on the Almanac dApp. Those orders route through a miner-specific proxy wallet to Polymarket's CLOB. Validators continuously synchronize miner wallet metadata from chain, then ingest each miner's trading history over a rolling 30-day window. They calculate ROI, qualified volume from winning trades, and trailing performance, then apply eligibility gates: minimum ROI, minimum volume, and a build-up period. A two-phase optimization distributes a fixed reward budget, first funding as much qualified volume as possible, then redistributing toward higher-ROI miners. Final weights are published on-chain to set Alpha Token emissions for the next epoch.
The current price sits at 0.00606 TAO with a market cap near 28,600 TAO and roughly 13,272 TAO of depth in the pool. Price has bounced 13.4% in the last 24 hours and is up 6.6% on the week, though it remains down 41% over 90 days. Net flow into the subnet over the last 7 days is positive at roughly 376 TAO. Despite that, the current Taoflow emission share is 0%, which means the smoothed 30-day net flow has not yet flipped positive. If the recent inflow trend continues, emission share should follow.
The repository is actively maintained. The most recent commit, on 2026-05-04, added Polymarket builder code for order attribution. The previous week added CLOB v2 SDK support and tightened market order precision. Three contributors appear in the public commit history, with one author driving the bulk of recent work. This is a small team shipping focused changes against a live product.
Why the project exists
- The problem it solves: Sports prediction quality is hard to verify. Claims are cheap, hindsight is easy, and most leaderboards can be gamed. Tying scores to real money on a public order book removes the room for fiction.
- The opportunity: Polymarket settled billions in volume across the 2025 sports cycle. A pipeline that surfaces consistently profitable signal generators has clear demand from market makers, betting syndicates, and copy-traders.
- The Bittensor advantage: Open competition, model-agnostic scoring, and continuous incentive pressure. Anyone can plug in a strategy, manual or automated, and get rewarded purely on outcome.
- Traction signals: The Almanac dApp is live in beta at beta.almanac.market. The repo has shipped active changes in the last week, including a Polymarket builder attribution update, CLOB v2 SDK integration, and order precision fixes. A 200 TAO single buy was flagged on chain in late April.
What stakers should check before buying alpha
Subnet storytelling is cheap. On-chain and product checks are not. Use the same framework as our subnet metrics guide:
| Check | Why |
|---|---|
| Real product / docs / repo | Separates shipping teams from narrative-only slots |
| Pool depth (TAO) | Your exit door: thin pools amplify slippage |
| Net flows (7d / 30d) | Under flow-based emissions, capital votes with its feet |
| Emission share | Whether the market is funding this subnet right now |
| Ownership concentration | Large holders can move a small alpha market |
| Immunity / deregistration | Post-immunity weak slots can lose the race (see immunity guide) |
Pull the live numbers on Almanac · SN41 rather than trusting any static screenshot in a blog post.
Risk factors
- Polymarket dependency: The entire scoring substrate runs through Polymarket's CLOB and proxy wallet routing. Any disruption, API change, or regulatory action against Polymarket directly affects miner activity and validator scoring.
- Sport coverage and seasonality: The dApp currently focuses on top leagues. As major seasons end, qualified volume can compress, which tightens the eligibility gates and concentrates rewards among fewer miners.
- Emission share at zero: Current Taoflow share is 0%, so distributed emissions are zero until the EMA of net flows turns positive. Recent 7-day flows are positive, but the catch-up depends on sustained inflow.
- Regulatory exposure: Sports prediction markets sit in an active regulatory zone in multiple jurisdictions. Restrictions on Polymarket access could limit who can mine.
- Small core team: The public commit history shows a concentrated authorship pattern. Execution risk is real if a key contributor steps back.
How this fits a TAO portfolio
Many holders keep a root vs subnet split: root for calmer TAO exposure, subnets like Almanac for thematic upside (and higher variance). If you use TaoScale, you can size SN41 from your wallet without handing over custody. See non-custodial staking.
- Live market: SN41 on TaoScale
- Browse and stake: /invest
- More subnet explainers: /blog/subnets
FAQ
What does Almanac do on Bittensor?
It is like a fantasy league where the prizes are paid by how much money your picks would have won, except the picks are real bets on real markets.
What is the SN41 alpha token?
When you stake TAO into subnet 41, you receive that subnet’s alpha. Its price versus TAO moves with the subnet’s pool (see what is dTAO).
How do I research Almanac before staking?
Read the mechanism above, open the official repo/docs when available, then verify pool depth, flows, and activity on SN41. Cross-check with the metrics checklist.
Is this financial advice?
No. TaoScale publishes educational explainers and live tools. Decisions to stake are yours alone.
Not financial advice. Educational overview of Almanac (SN41) compiled from public project materials and ecosystem documentation. Mechanisms and market structure change, so verify live data and official sources before acting.
