What makes Mentat secure?

When you delegate with Mentat Minds, you do not send your funds to a smart contract or a centralized entity. You set up a proxy.

A proxy is a special account that can perform certain actions on behalf of a main account, while keeping that main account protected and rarely used.

A proxy lets you give limited permissions to another account to act for you, without putting your main account at risk.

For example, if your main account holds most of your funds and you almost never use it, you can use a proxy to do daily actions (like staking, validating, or voting), while your main funds stay safe in the primary account.

When you sign the transaction from Mentat Minds’ app, you effectively set one of the strategies address as a Staking Proxy to yours.

This gives the strategy the right to buy and sell subnet tokens from your account, but not the ability to send funds outside of your account.

What if the proxy private key gets compromised?

Even if that were to happen, an attacker couldn’t steal your funds. They could use them to pump a subnet token they hold. In that case, you would still be holding a valuable subnet token while we detect the situation and reset the proxy.

Useful links to go further:

• The official announcement about the addition of the Proxy Pallet within Bittensor.

• The docs that explains how the Staking Proxy works in substrate chains like Bittensor.