Strategy Challenge

The Strategy Challenge is the platform's public contest: entries run under the same rules, and the platform calculates performance and updates the leaderboard every day. Winners advance to the live final and receive cash prizes and a group allocation ceiling; the ceiling is a limit, not a funding commitment. Exact dates, drawdown caps and run parameters are set out in the Contest Rules.

Schedule

The binding deadline is not on the contest home page timeline. Its exact time is shown on the entry card in your Contest Panel.

Groups

There are two groups: the Individual Group and the Institution Group. Your group determines the eligibility materials you submit. Institution Group entrants who compete with an exchange account are ranked on their own in the institution API zone. Each email address or account can register only once, and one legal entity can have only one entry. A team or individual who registers more than once with multiple accounts will be disqualified.

Tracks

A track is a strategy category. You declare it yourself when you bind your contest strategy; the institution API zone has no tracks. Each track has its own maximum drawdown cap, which is used in Pre-screening.

Why ranking is by track

Arbitrage and market-neutral strategies aim for steady returns at low exposure, while one-way strategies can have much larger returns and drawdowns. Ranked together by return, higher-risk strategies would have a built-in advantage. So each track is ranked on its own, with its own drawdown cap, and placings are not comparable across tracks. Institutions compete with their own exchange accounts, where fills, fees and the markets they can trade all differ from paper trading, so they are ranked on their own in the institution API zone.

How to enter

After you register, open the Contest Panel under Strategy Challenge in the top navigation to see your registration status, bound strategy, pre-screening result and performance.

You register with a single form. You do not need identity verification, but you must verify your email first.

Before you start

• The contest is in its registration period. Before registration opens, you can fill in the form and save a draft.
• A verified email. Without one you can save a draft but cannot submit. See Sign up and log in.
• Eligibility materials: depending on the group you choose. Some groups ask for documents, such as proof of identity or institutional credentials (for example a business license or certificate of incorporation), and the registration page lists the ones your group needs; a group that asks for none only needs your registration details. JPG, PNG and PDF are supported, up to 10 MB per file and 10 files in total. Materials are used only for eligibility checks and are never made public.

Submit your registration

1. Open the Strategy Challenge and click Register now. Before registration opens, the form shows Prepare your entry early.
2. Choose your Group. The Institution Group also chooses an Entry channel: Platform strategy or Institution API.
3. Upload your eligibility materials if your group asks for them. In the Individual Group you can enter an Entry name (up to 24 characters; leave it blank and the system assigns one), or select I am registering on behalf of a team, in which case the team name becomes your public name.
4. Check the boxes to accept the Contest Rules and Privacy Policy, then click Submit registration. To save without submitting, click Save draft only.

Once you submit, Contest Panel appears in the left navigation.

Review

After you submit, your registration goes through the eligibility review your group requires. Initial screening usually finishes within 24 hours; the re-check for materials that need an eligibility review takes about 24–48 hours. You are notified in-app and by email.

When the contest starts, you may also see "Withdrawn without entry" or "Did not pass pre-screening". See Pre-screening and lock.

Once your registration is approved, bind a version of a workbench strategy as your contest strategy and declare a track before the binding deadline. The deadline is shown on your entry card.

This page covers the Platform strategy entry channel. If you enter with an exchange account in the Institution Group, see Institution Group: enter with an exchange API.

Before you start

• Your registration status is Approved and your entry channel is Platform strategy.
• You have a version in the workbench that is saved and has a successful backtest. Trial runs on a draft do not count.
• The binding deadline has not passed.

Bind your contest strategy

1. Open the Contest Panel and, on the Bind a strategy and complete its brief card, choose a strategy and version. Greyed-out versions have no successful backtest and cannot be selected.
2. Choose a Track: Arbitrage, Market neutral or Other. You can add a description of your strategy idea (optional, up to 500 characters).
3. Confirm the binding. The card shows Adjustable until [time].

• Contest versions can trade only USDT-quoted instruments, such as BTC/USDT; this is checked at binding, and a version that does not qualify cannot be bound.
• A strategy can be entered in only one contest at a time.
• During the contest, your strategy runs on the contest's shared parameters. The backtests you ran in the workbench used the platform's default fees, so results may differ.

Before the deadline: rebind or change track

• Rebind: choose a different strategy or version on your entry card. After you switch to a new version, your preview performance starts over and pre-screening runs again.
• Change track: changes only the track, not the strategy, so your preview performance is unaffected. Pre-screening is re-evaluated against the new track's drawdown cap, and an entry that passed before may no longer pass.

After the deadline

• Between the binding deadline and the contest start: the card shows Binding closed. You can no longer rebind or change your track.
• After the contest starts: the card shows Entry locked — simulation running. To change your track, click Request a track change in the Declared track field, and staff will review it. Each entry can request this only once, and a request cannot be withdrawn after you submit it. An entry with no declared track is treated as Other. If the request is approved, pre-screening is re-evaluated against the new track; an entry that does not pass is not ranked. Track change requests are no longer accepted once the list of finalists is published.

Pre-screening decides whether your contest strategy can enter the contest proper. The platform runs the version you bound on this edition's shared run parameters and checks whether its maximum drawdown exceeds the drawdown cap of your declared track.

• There is no gate at binding. The result usually appears on your entry card within a few minutes of binding.
• The verdict at the moment the contest starts is the one that counts: a contest strategy that has not passed by then does not enter the contest proper.
• Institution Group entries that compete with an exchange API are not pre-screened.

Why pre-screening exists

Each track's drawdown cap represents the range of risk acceptable for that type of strategy. Pre-screening runs every contest strategy on the same parameters to make sure every strategy that enters the contest proper stays within the risk range of its declared track. The verdict is frozen at the start, so every entrant is judged at the same moment by the same standard.

Check your pre-screening result

Your entry card shows the current status and a suggested next step. If you did not pass, before the deadline you can rebind to a version with a smaller drawdown, publish a new version and bind it, or change your track. After the deadline, contact operations for a manual decision.

Contest start and lock

When the contest starts, contest strategies are locked and pre-screening verdicts are frozen:

You trade in your own exchange account, and the platform reads the account once a day to calculate your performance. You do not need to create a strategy in the workbench, and there is no pre-screening. The exchanges you can use are Binance, OKX, Kraken, Coinbase, Deribit, Bybit and UMX. These entries are ranked on their own in the institution API zone, with no categories.

Before you start

• Your group is the Institution Group and your entry channel is Institution API. If you picked the wrong one, you can switch it in the Contest Panel after your registration is approved and before you bind an account.
• A read-only API key. Keys with trading, withdrawal or transfer permissions are rejected.
• Account equity of at least 1,000 USD.
• On 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.
• One legal entity can have only one entry. The business licence is checked when the registration is reviewed.

Bind your account

1. In the Contest Panel, choose an exchange and enter your keys: Binance needs an API key and secret; OKX also needs a Passphrase.
2. On Binance, declare the spot pairs to count under Declare your trading scope:
   • USD-M futures are counted automatically;
   • Spot fills in undeclared pairs do not count toward your trade count or trading volume, but your return is still measured on the whole account's equity; holding an undeclared coin triggers a reminder and a manual review;
   • You can add to your declaration before the contest starts. The scope can only grow, and it is frozen once the contest starts.
3. Confirm the binding. When it succeeds, the page shows the account UID and equity. Check that it is the right account.

Keys are stored encrypted and deleted automatically after the qualifier ends. If you advance to the live final, you bind again before the final.

How performance is calculated

• Starting equity is read for everyone when the contest starts, not when you bind. An entry whose equity is below 1,000 USD at the start appears on the leaderboard 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. On days with deposits or withdrawals, trading volume is not counted.
• Trading volume counts only the markets the platform has connected, scaled to the contest's standard capital; on a day when funds traded in any other market, that day's volume is not counted.
• The contest's shared run parameters (initial capital, fees and so on) do not apply to exchange API entries.
• If the account cannot be read for several days in a row, you are notified first; if it stays unreadable, the entry is treated as withdrawn 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 withdrawn. 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; a night we could not read because of an exchange outage or for reasons on our side does not count as your absence.

Advancement

The institution API zone's seats and advancement gates are set out in the contest rules.

Account status messages

During the qualifier, the platform calculates performance daily and updates the Contest Leaderboard. During registration, the leaderboard page and contest home page show a preview leaderboard labeled "Preview · not scored". Everything resets to zero and is recalculated when the contest starts. Below the preview leaderboard, Watch list: not ranked yet lists entries that have no results yet.

Contest Leaderboard

View it on the leaderboard page or the Strategy Challenge home page.

• Update frequency: daily, with data about two days behind. The board date is shown at the top. During the qualifier the leaderboard is provisional; results become final only after platform certification.
• Groups: the paper-trading zone has All, plus the three tracks Arbitrage, Market neutral and Other; the institution API zone has a board of its own, with no tracks. Advancement is calculated separately for each track and for the institution API zone.
• Columns: during the contest, Rank, Strategy, Trend, Cumulative return, Sharpe and Max drawdown; click a row to see details such as trading volume and turnover. The preview board during registration shows Rank, Strategy, Trend, Cumulative return, Max drawdown, Trade count and Start date.
• Sort: during the contest only, by Overall rank, Cumulative return, Sharpe or Max drawdown.

Institution Group entries that compete with an exchange account are ranked in the Institution API zone.

Ranking rules

The final ranking combines Quant performance and Judge review, with the weights published in the contest rules; the qualifier may be ranked on quant performance alone. How quant performance is calculated, and its weights, are published in the contest rules. Each track and the institution API zone are ranked separately, and placings are not comparable between them. Tie-break rules are also published in the contest rules. Judge review applies to the paper-trading zone only; the institution API zone has no judge scoring and is ranked on quant performance alone.

When an entry is not ranked

Entries marked Not ranked are excluded from the ranking, and your Contest Panel explains why. Common reasons are no trades during the period, not passing pre-screening, or (Institution Group) a starting net asset value below US$1,000.

Shared run parameters

Paper trading uses the same parameters for every contest strategy, published in the contest rules: initial capital, fee rate, leverage cap, warm-up period (not scored), daily scoring window and position mode.

• Only one direction is held at a time; an opposite signal closes the position before opening a new one;
• Fees are charged on every open and every close.

Advancement

After the qualifier ends and the judging deadline passes, 30 entrants in all, across the three tracks and the institution API zone, advance to the live final. The institution API zone's seats and gates are set out in the contest rules. The Advancement list is published once the leaderboard is final. If you object to the list, contact us.

Advancing entrants are notified, and the contest panel shows the list confirmation deadline. Complete identity verification before it. If you do not, or your identity does not match your registration, you lose the place, and it passes in turn to the next-ranked entrants in your track (for an institution, in the institution API zone). The ID you uploaded at registration does not count as identity verification.

Awards

Maximum allocation is a ceiling. It is not cash and not a funding commitment; the actual amount is set by the platform after post-contest due diligence.

Placings are decided by overall place across the whole contest, with institutions and strategy entrants ranked together.

There are also three special awards of 3,000 USD each:

Each edition's prizes are as published on the contest rules page. Honor runs have no cash prizes.

After the contest settles, the top 100 on the overall leaderboard automatically join the Talent pool.

Claim your prize

After you win, the award card in your Contest Panel shows the verification deadline:

1. Click Verify identity and complete Identity verification. The materials you submitted at registration are used only for contest eligibility and do not replace identity verification for claiming a prize.
2. Once verification passes, the card shows Passed.

The Award Winners list can be viewed once published. Vacant places are marked Not awarded.

The talent pool is where the platform and its partners look for strong PMs. Any registered user can submit a profile here. After the contest settles, the top 100 on the overall leaderboard are added automatically, and their profiles show contest results verified by the platform.

You decide whether your profile is public:

This option has no default. You must choose one, and you can change it at any time.

Fill in your profile

Open Talent pool in the left navigation, fill in your one-line introduction, experience, strengths and so on, choose a visibility option and save. Your contact details, LinkedIn, X and website are never made public; they are only for the platform to reach you.

Once you are selected, your profile includes the results frozen when the contest settled, such as cumulative return, max drawdown, Sharpe and number of trades. These figures are verified by the platform; what you write yourself is marked as unverified.