Tao Flow & Net Tao Flow

As of May 2026, there are two types of tao flow. The article attempts to first disambiguate them and then define them, and their uses.

Tao Flow

Introduced in November 2025, tao flow is the measurement of staking and unstaking through the subnet liquidity pool. Its original use was to determine the emissions of a subnet. This changed in May 2026, with the introduction of Net Tao Flow.

Tao flow is still an interesting figure - it is a measure of how stakeholders are entering and exiting the subnet.

Net Tao Flow

Introduced in May 2026 to counteract issues with tao flow. The principal issue is that while tao flow is a good metric, it does not account for subsidies from the chain. A new term, Protocol cost is added.

If netTaoFlow <0, it is set at 0 - there is no concept of negative emission.

But to smooth these values, a 30 day exponential moving average is used for both.

This new term is used to define the emissions delivered to a subnet.

Protocol cost

Each block, the subnet is subsidized by Tao Emission - broken into Tao injected into the pool and chain buys. Root sells of alpha work in the opposite direction: when validators claim and swap their root‑alpha dividends, TAO leaves the pool, offsetting part of the subsidy.

Exponential Moving Average example

To smooth this equation, each subnet’s flow is placed in an exponential moving average with a half life of 30 days:

This video explains the launch of tao flow:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WYteMtyeLA

Flow based emission

Starting in November 2025, tao flow will begin to be a part of the tao emission equation. By December 2025, 100% of tao emitted will be based on tao flow.

What is flow

In every subnet, tao flows in and out of the liquidity pool through staking actions:

Flow is only staking it is NOT based on emission, root proportion or neuron registration.We can then normalize the flows across all subnets: