Your Simple Guide to Vanta (SN8)
The proprietary trading industry now carries a valuation of roughly $20 billion, with over 2,000 firms operating worldwide. Yet the model has drawn persistent criticism. According to industry data, only about 4% to 10% of traders pass evaluation challenges, and fewer than 1% maintain a funded account for more than 12 months. Many firms rely on multi-phase evaluations, opaque rules, and delayed payouts that create uncertainty for traders. Vanta (SN8) tackles this problem by building the world’s first decentralized prop trading network on Bittensor, where traders, quant engineers, and machine learning teams compete openly for rewards based purely on verifiable, risk-adjusted performance.
What is Vanta (SN8)?
Vanta (SN8) is a Bittensor subnet that aggregates trading signals from a global network of competing miners to produce comprehensive financial market intelligence. The project originally operated under the name Proprietary Trading Network (PTN) before rebranding to Vanta Network. It runs as Subnet 8 on the Bittensor mainnet and is one of the longest-standing subnets in the ecosystem.
At its core, Vanta (SN8) functions like a decentralized prop trading firm. Miners submit futures-based signals (long, short, or flat) across three asset classes: forex, crypto, and equities. Validators then verify those trades, store them, and continuously track each miner’s portfolio returns. The subnet distributes rewards based on risk-adjusted performance, not raw profit alone. Key evaluation metrics include Omega score, total portfolio return, and strict drawdown limits.
The competition is deliberately harsh. In fact, Taoshi, the team behind the project, describes Vanta (SN8) as the most challenging and competitive trading network in the world. Miners can deploy algorithmic strategies, deep learning models, or manual quant approaches depending on their expertise. However, only strategies that deliver consistent, risk-managed returns across dozens of supported trade pairs survive.
Beyond the competition itself, Vanta (SN8) also produces a tangible product. The aggregated signal feed flows into consumer-facing applications, creating a two-part system: a decentralized platform that generates trading signals, and consumable outputs that inform real trading decisions through products like Glitch Financial and the Taoshi Request Network. As a result, the network does not just reward top traders. It also delivers institutional-grade market intelligence to everyday users.
How Vanta (SN8) works?
Vanta (SN8) operates through a competitive loop between miners and validators, governed by strict rules that simulate real-world trading conditions.
Miners act as traders. They submit long, short, or flat signals for supported trade pairs during market hours. Each signal represents a directional bet on a specific asset with defined leverage. The network enforces tight positional leverage limits: crypto positions range from 0.01x to 0.5x, while forex and equities allow 0.1x to 5x. Additionally, a portfolio-wide leverage cap of 10x applies across all open positions simultaneously. Because of their higher volatility, crypto positions count at 10x their face value toward this cap.
Validators receive these signals and evaluate them through a debt-based scoring system. This system tracks each miner’s emissions, performance, and penalties on a rolling basis. Consequently, weights reflect the previous week’s performance, with payouts targeting completion by midnight on Sunday each week. All positions are uni-directional, meaning a position that starts long cannot flip short. Miners must close the existing position first and open a new one in the opposite direction.
A key design choice is that the network applies realistic trading costs to filter out strategies that would fail in live markets. First, a spread fee scales with leverage on every order. On top of that, a carry fee of 10.95% per year for crypto, 5.25% for equities, and 3% for forex applies to open positions at 1x leverage. Furthermore, a slippage model penalizes high-leverage orders in low-liquidity assets. As a result, only strategies that account for real-world execution costs can compete effectively.
Eliminations also enforce quality ruthlessly. Miners who exceed a 10% maximum drawdown from their peak portfolio value face immediate removal. In addition, a plagiarism detection system analyzes the uniqueness of every submitted order. Any miner caught copying another miner’s trades triggers instant elimination. Moreover, miners who rank below the 15th-highest performer in their asset class enter a 30-day probationary period. If they fail to outperform the lowest-ranked active miner within that window, they lose their spot as well. Once a hotkey leaves the network for any reason, it becomes permanently blacklisted and cannot re-enter. This creates a high-stakes environment where only genuinely competitive strategies survive.
Who is behind it?
Arrash Yasavolian founded Taoshi, Inc. in 2023 in San Francisco and serves as CEO. He brings over 15 years of experience in the tech industry, including engineering leadership roles at LinkedIn and several successfully exited startups. Yasavolian studied biochemistry and molecular biology at the University of California, Davis, before transitioning into software engineering and eventually quantitative trading.
Before founding Taoshi, Yasavolian created and led TARVIS Labs, where he developed the TARVIS algorithmic trading strategy. Specifically, TARVIS exploited short-term price discrepancies across markets through rapid trades based on volatility patterns and temporal inefficiencies. Taoshi acquired the company in 2024 and contributed the strategy directly to the Vanta Network as one of its competing algorithms. In an interview with Authority Magazine, Yasavolian described the limitations of relying on a single strategy as the insight that led him to explore Bittensor and ultimately build a multi-strategy decentralized network.
The Taoshi team includes professionals in machine learning, data science, and quantitative finance with backgrounds spanning both the technology sector and Wall Street. All code sits on GitHub under an MIT license, and the repository currently shows over 1,000 commits. The team maintains active community channels on Discord and X: @taoshiio. A live trading dashboard at dashboard.taoshi.io provides full visibility into miner performance, positions, and network metrics.
Yasavolian has also contributed thought leadership to the broader ecosystem. In a CoinDesk op-ed published in July 2025, he compared Bittensor to a next-generation incubator for AI projects. He also presented at Proof of Talk 2025 alongside other Bittensor subnet owners to discuss building sustainable business models on decentralized networks.
Why it is valuable?
Vanta (SN8) addresses a structural problem in the trading industry. Access to advanced quantitative strategies has historically required significant capital, proprietary infrastructure, and institutional connections. Traditional prop firms charge evaluation fees ranging from $50 to over $1,000, often impose multi-phase challenges with opaque rules, and retain large portions of trader profits. In particular, many firms have drawn criticism for modifying conditions or delaying payouts in ways that traders cannot independently verify.
Vanta (SN8) replaces this model with blockchain-verified transparency. All miner contributions, validator scores, performance records, and reward distributions live on-chain. The rules remain consistent, publicly documented, and programmatically enforced. Consequently, there are no hidden conditions or subjective evaluations. Meanwhile, the barrier to entry stays low. Anyone with Bittensor’s native token (TAO) can register a miner, and the entire codebase remains open source. Taoshi also provides open strategy-building resources through its community Discord, along with data partnerships with Glassnode and LunarCrush.
The network’s $30M+ annualized rewards pool provides meaningful financial incentives that attract serious talent. This makes Vanta (SN8) one of the highest-rewarding subnets in the entire Bittensor ecosystem. The signals that competing miners produce flow into real products. Users can purchase trading data through the Taoshi Request Network, or access automated strategies through Glitch Financial, the company’s SaaS platform launched in October 2024. Glitch lets users integrate AI-powered trading strategies into their own exchange and brokerage accounts with just a few clicks, while maintaining full control over funds in a non-custodial environment. Behind the scenes, Taoshi’s internal quant team analyzes the best-performing miner strategies to build a “super strategy” that adapts in real time to market conditions.
The Theta token ties the ecosystem together. As Vanta’s dTAO alpha token, Theta enables the community to invest directly into the subnet through Bittensor’s Dynamic TAO framework. Importantly, a portion of Glitch Financial’s revenue goes toward acquiring Theta tokens, which then flow into a DAO for strategic initiatives and ecosystem development. This creates a flywheel effect: better miners attract more users, which generates more revenue, which in turn strengthens both the network and the token.
The future of Vanta (SN8)
Taoshi continues to evolve Vanta (SN8) at an aggressive development pace. The team regularly publishes governance proposals that refine scoring, fees, and risk management. So far, over 26 proposals have introduced mechanics such as asset-specific scoring, PnL-based scoring, collateral requirements, a plagiarism microservice, and an emissions burn mechanism.
The launch of Vanta Trading in February 2026 represents the most significant expansion in the project’s history. This platform functions as a decentralized alternative to conventional prop firms, offering a one-step evaluation with an 8% profit target, a 100% profit split, and zero take fees. Evaluation pricing starts at $149, $249, or $349 depending on tier. The Vanta Network serves as the underlying engine, tracking and validating all trader performance on-chain. According to the announcement, payouts go out in USD via Stripe and remain fully verifiable through the blockchain.
On the infrastructure side, the team has introduced a collateral system where top-performing miners deposit alpha tokens for funding. Profits then go toward buying back alpha, reinforcing token value. Complementary tools like the Vanta CLI streamline network interaction for both miners and validators. Additionally, auto-trading integration through partners like Glitch Financial allows users to act on the network’s signals without manual execution.
The longer-term vision positions Vanta (SN8) not just as a Bittensor subnet, but as a full-stack decentralized trading infrastructure that competes directly with the established prop trading industry. Instead of relying on opaque evaluation models and centralized decision-making, Taoshi builds on transparent rules, verifiable payouts, and open-source code. With a growing product ecosystem and a competitive network that eliminates underperformers automatically, the team aims to deliver what it describes as the next generation of financial market access.
Sources:
https://www.taoshi.io/vanta
https://github.com/taoshidev/vanta-network
https://www.vantatrading.io
