Two very different participant counts get quoted for Gonka, and mixing them up is the single most common source of "explorers disagree" confusion.

Active participants are the entities actually doing work in the current epoch — the ones that showed up for this round's proof-of-compute census, hold weight, and are serving inference or validating proofs right now. As of early July 2026 (around epoch 318), this number was roughly 35, operating on the order of 196 ML nodes and roughly a thousand live GPUs.

Registered participants is the cumulative count of every participant address registered on chain since genesis — in the thousands. Most of these are not doing anything in the current epoch; they registered at some point and may or may not still be active.

GNKScan's participants page reports the active set, because that is what secures the chain right now — consensus power, model assignments, and inference allocation all flow from the active census, not the historical registration count.

A participant showing zero inferences mid-epoch isn't necessarily gone — it may simply have missed this round's census and dropped out of the active set without being un-registered. See the Gonka FAQ and What Is Gonka? for more on this distinction.