What if you could turn a decentralized mining network into a global army of ethical hackers? That’s the premise behind RedTeam, a subnet on Bittensor that pits miners against each other in competitive security challenges. And the results, at least on paper, are hard to ignore: bot detection efficacy jumped from 74.3% to 99.5% over 11 months of continuous adversarial testing.
The project, operated by cybersecurity firm Innerworks under Bittensor’s subnet 61 (SN61), is now gearing up for its next phase. An “Immune System” designed to expand bot detection into real-time attack-and-defense operations is on the way, complete with a new challenge called “Bot Virus” that aims to breed adversarial agents capable of doing both simultaneously.
How turning miners into hackers actually works
Miners submit code-based solutions to specific security challenges. Those solutions get evaluated in controlled environments, and performers earn TAO tokens based on how well their submissions stack up against the competition.
Since its launch in late 2024, RedTeam has run 14 distinct challenges, deprecating 9 of them as the network’s capabilities matured past the difficulty threshold.
