Contest Rules

Basic Information

Prize Settings

Total prize pool

50,000 USD

Maximum allocation

50,000,000 USD

Placings are decided by overall place across the whole contest: institutions and strategy entrants are ranked together, and prizes are not awarded zone by zone.

Institutions do not compete for: Highest Trading Volume Award.

For Most Consistent Profit Award, the entrant's return must also be in the top 10% of its track. Institutions are compared only with other institutions on that metric (such as return), not by leaderboard place: the top 10% of institutions qualify, and when there are fewer than 10 institutions at least 1 qualifies.

Groups and Eligibility

• Each group's eligibility requirements are listed in the table below; registration details and supporting materials are reviewed by the organizer, with results delivered via in-platform notification.
• One email / account per entry. Using multiple accounts to register the same team or individual more than once is grounds for disqualification.
• One legal entity may have only one entry. The business licence is checked when the registration is reviewed; an entity that registers more than once is disqualified.

Institutions competing with an exchange account trade their own funds; the simulated capital does not apply.

Strategy categories and advancement

Contest groups govern eligibility, supporting-material review, and paper capital. Paper-trading entries are ranked by track (the paper-trading zone); entries competing with an exchange account through the institution API channel are ranked on their own in the institution API zone, with no tracks.

Entrants competing with a strategy declare their track when binding it. It can be changed on the entry card until the contest starts; after that it is fixed, and a change has to be requested and is reviewed by staff. Each track is ranked on its own, and pre-screening applies the drawdown cap of the declared track.

30 advance to the live final

Advancing entrants must complete identity verification within the confirmation window. Anyone who does not, or whose identity does not match their registration, loses the place, which passes to the next-ranked entrant in the same track (for an institution, in the institution API zone).

Scoring and Ranking

Leverage limit and violations

Leverage is judged as set: after each rebalance fill, the notional value of all positions (futures and spot together, long and short both counted) ÷ total account equity at that fill must not exceed 20x; only USDT balances are cash; USDC and every other coin count as positions. A rebalance that leaves the account above 20x makes the day a leverage violation; exactly 20x is not, and a day without a rebalance is judged on the leverage last set. Changes in marked leverage from price moves do not count: the marked leverage at the day's start (00:00 UTC+8) and end (24:00 UTC+8) is recorded, not judged. If equity is zero or negative at a rebalance, the day's leverage is not judged. An engine that does not report its rebalances (such as the platform's own workbench) is still judged on marked leverage at the day's start and end; either reading above 20x is a violation; once it reports them, the same rule applies.

• If a trading day newly included in a leaderboard has leverage above the contest limit, the entrant is not ranked on that leaderboard and is marked "Violation (leverage over the limit)"; later leaderboards are judged on the days each of them newly includes.
• The final leaderboard after the contest ends looks only at leverage on the last trading day: if that day is over the limit, the entrant is not ranked on the final leaderboard; violations on earlier days are recorded but do not affect it.
• The organizer may exempt individual trading days after manual review; an exemption is shown publicly on the leaderboard as "Exempted after manual review".
• A leverage violation is handled under this section and does not disqualify anyone automatically; for repeated violations, the organizer decides whether to disqualify the entrant.
• Institution entrants competing with their own exchange account, whose rebalances the platform cannot read, are judged on marked leverage at the day's start and end — the account readings from the night before and that night (23:30 UTC+8); either reading above the limit is a violation. USDT, USDC, FDUSD, BUSD and TUSD balances all count as cash; if a night's positions could not be read, that reading is not judged, and if the same day's other reading is over the limit, the day is still a violation.

Schedule Timeline

1. 2026-08-01 15:00Registration opensParticipants complete registration, submit materials, and pass eligibility review.
2. 2026-10-31 03:00Registration closesNew registrations close; submitted materials continue through review.
3. 2026-11-01 03:00Qualifier starts (paper trading)Strategies run in the platform paper trading environment, with daily performance and leaderboard updates.
4. 2026-12-01 00:00Qualifier endsQualifier scoring ends and its performance is frozen.
5. 2026-12-16 04:00Live Finals QualificationJudging ends and the list of finalists is published.
6. 2026-12-19 04:00Winner Announcement
7. After paper tradingLive-stage advancement30 entrants go through to the live final. Live-stage rules and allocation sizes will be announced separately.

All times are Beijing time (UTC+8)

How to Enter

1. 01Register and pass reviewSubmit your entry, choose a group, and provide the materials requested on the registration page.
2. 02Create and validate a strategyCreate a strategy on the platform and confirm it runs correctly via backtest.
3. 03Bind your contest versionPick one of your saved strategy versions as the contest entry; you may rebind freely until binding closes.
4. 04Unified run and judgingOnce your version locks, the platform computes performance under this edition's run rules and feeds ranking and review.

Pre-screening

Binding a contest strategy has no pre-screening gate in the preview period: no qualifying backtest is needed first. Pre-screening is judged before the contest formally starts, against the maximum drawdown cap of the track you declared. Institutions entering with their own exchange account are not pre-screened; to advance they must pass the institution gates instead (see “Strategy categories and advancement”).

The platform runs pre-screening itself, under this edition's unified run parameters, over the window the contest publishes; the result usually arrives within minutes of binding and shows on your contest entry.

Qualification window 2026-03-12 to 2026-09-11

Maximum drawdown cap by strategy category

Pre-screening applies the maximum drawdown cap of the track you declared. The tracks themselves are defined under Strategy categories and advancement above.

When the pre-screening run finishes, a "pre-screening complete" message arrives in the strategy conversation. It means the backtest has finished running, not that it passed: whether it passed is decided by the rules on this page, and the verdict is shown on your contest entry.

If it does not pass

Binding and rebinding close before the contest starts; the exact cutoff is shown on your entry card. Until then you can publish a new version and bind another one in its place, or change the track on your entry card, and pre-screening is judged again for the new version or track. After the cutoff neither is possible, and only a manual judgment by the operators can change the result: an entry that has not passed when the contest starts cannot take part in this edition's qualifier.

Shared run parameters

Contest strategies that run on the platform share one set of parameters, configured by the organizer. Entrants on the institution API channel trade their own exchange account and settle on its real fills, so the figures below do not apply to them — except the leverage limit, which does (see "Leverage limit and violations").

The warm-up period is not scored.

A backtest you run yourself before binding is charged the platform's default fee rate, not the shared rate in the table above, so its result will differ slightly. Once the entry is bound, its backtests are charged at the shared rate.

Institution API channel

Institution entrants may compete with their own exchange account. We read the results through a read-only API key.

• Institution group only. It is not available to individual entrants.
• Exchanges you can use: Binance, OKX, Kraken, Coinbase, Deribit, Bybit and UMX.
• Coinbase: accounts in the EU or the US cannot take part. Accounts elsewhere must not hold stocks, prediction markets or US futures during the contest; a night on which they hold any cannot be valued and counts as a night we could not read.
• Read-only keys only. A key carrying trade, withdrawal or transfer permission is refused at binding.
• Each entry binds one exchange account, and the same account cannot enter the same contest twice. You cannot change the account yourself once it is bound; to change the account or the exchange before binding closes (24 hours before the qualifier starts), ask operations to return the binding, then bind again from the same registration. Bindings are not returned after binding closes.
• During the contest you cannot unbind or replace the key, not even for the same account. If the key is deleted, expires or has its permissions changed, the entry is suspended, is no longer scored, and is passed to a person to handle. On Kraken and Coinbase you can add a derivatives key for the same account during the contest.
• We read equity and fills once a day. We never place orders, move funds, or change anything in your account.
• The equity read covers everything you hold at that exchange; traded volume and trade count cover only the markets we have connected — on a day when funds traded in any other market, that day's volume is left out.
• The starting line is read when trading opens, not when you bind — binding early in the registration window is neither an advantage nor a penalty.
• Starting equity must be at least 10 USD: an account below that amount cannot be bound, and an entry whose starting line read at contest open is below it stays on the board but is not ranked.
• Results are scored as a time-weighted return. During the contest you may not deposit, withdraw or transfer between accounts; depositing before the contest starts is fine.
• An entry that operations confirm had a deposit or withdrawal is not ranked on that period's leaderboard; on the day of the deposit or withdrawal a loss still counts and a gain counts as 0.
• Several days without a successful read triggers a notice; a sustained failure to read is treated as abandoning the entry under the rules. Once reads start failing, the account card in your contest panel shows the number of days after which the entry is treated as abandoned. A night we could not read because of an exchange outage or for reasons on our side does not count as your absence. A night we could not read counts as a flat return.
• The key is stored encrypted and used only for the daily read; we delete it automatically when the qualifier ends. An institution that advances to the live final binds again before the final.
• Places in the institution API zone are calculated among institutions only, with the same scoring method as the paper-trading zone's overall leaderboard (see “Scoring and Ranking”), and with no judge scoring.
• Institution API zone results are updated every night and count up to the leaderboard date.

Execution and Fairness

This section applies only to contest strategies run on the platform.

During the preliminary round, contest strategies run on the platform use the same backtest engine and the same market data, with the shared parameters listed under "Shared run parameters"; each trading day (UTC+8) is run by the platform on that day's market data after it ends. Results come only from market moves after the contest starts, so a strategy cannot be fitted to history it already knows.

• Positions use one-way (netting) mode: within one account, an instrument has a single net position at any moment and cannot be held long and short at once; different instruments, and spot alongside futures, can be held together.
• A fee is charged on both opening and closing a position, at the configured rate, and is reflected in the equity calculation.
• The engine has no margin and no forced liquidation: it does not limit position size, losses are never force-closed, and account equity can fall to zero or below. The leverage limit is checked afterwards, as set out in "Leverage limit and violations".
• The trading symbol and interval declared in your bound version are that strategy's run parameters and freeze with the version at lock.

Awards and Verification

• Winners must complete verification by the deadline communicated to them in their award notice.
• A slot whose verification fails or lapses passes to the next eligible candidate: for a placing, by overall rank across the whole contest; for a special award, by that award's own criteria.

Discipline and Anti-Cheating

Contest Agreements