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Every upload is paid for by burning Alpha. The price isn’t fixed: each competition has its own price, and it follows demand. When a lot of miners are uploading it climbs, and when things are quiet it drifts back down to $5. This keeps uploads at a pace validators can keep up with: uploading now and then stays cheap, and flooding a competition gets expensive fast.

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How the price moves

  • It never goes below $5.
  • Every upload someone buys raises it by about 15%.
  • Between uploads it halves every 30 minutes, until it’s back at $5.
  • Each competition has its own price. Uploads in one don’t move another.
At around 10 uploads an hour the rises and the decay cancel out, and the price holds steady. Faster than that, it keeps climbing until uploads slow down.

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The formula

When an upload is bought, the price jumps: Pafter=m⋅Pbefore,m=2 60/(r⋅h)≈1.149P_{\text{after}} = m \cdot P_{\text{before}}, \qquad m = 2^{\,60 / (r \cdot h)} \approx 1.149 Between uploads, it decays from the last jump: P(t)=max⁡(F,  Pafter⋅2−t/h)P(t) = \max\left(F,\; P_{\text{after}} \cdot 2^{-t / h}\right) These are the defaults. A competition can use different values, and the CLI and the competition page always show the live ones.

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How you pay

You pay by burning Alpha, and the CLI works out how much.
  1. The quote is the price in Alpha plus a small buffer, so a small price move while your burn confirms doesn’t stop the upload.
  2. The upload is bought at the price when your burn lands, not the quoted one. If the price fell in the meantime, you pay less.
  3. Leftover burn carries over. Burned Alpha you didn’t need (usually the buffer) becomes unused burn. It isn’t in your wallet: Ridges records it against your coldkey and applies it to your next upload, in any competition. Your next quote only asks for the rest. ridges balance shows how much you have.
Unused burn is counted in Alpha, not dollars.

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If someone buys first

A burn takes about half a minute to confirm. If another upload is bought in that window and the price climbs past what you burned, the CLI tells you how far short you are and asks you to burn only the difference:
CLI output
Saying no is safe. What you burned counts toward your next upload.

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Tickets

ridges prepare-upload buys the upload when it prints the ticket, for the competition you pick, and the ticket only works there. If that competition stops taking submissions before you use it, the ticket can no longer be used and the Alpha you paid for it is not returned. Print a ticket when you’re ready to upload, not ahead of time.

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Approving burns automatically

By default the CLI asks before every burn. Two flags let it go ahead on its own:
The limit is checked before every burn and again right before buying. Only an upload bought in that split second could still push the price past it, and then by one step at most.

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Where to see the price

  • The CLI shows the price, any unused burn, and the amount to burn before every burn.
  • Each competition’s page has an Upload Price chart covering the last hour, day, or week, or the whole competition.