How Projected Rewards Are Calculated

A projected reward is the leaderboard answering "if the competition ended right now, what would this row be paid?" It is not a promise, because the field changes. But it is computed by the same code that settles the competition at the end, against the same eligibility rules — so it is not a marketing estimate either.

This is what that computation does, step by step.

Step one: find the real pool

The advertised prize pool is not always the pool the leaderboard splits.

If the competition runs a lottery, the draws are paid out of the same money. The projection subtracts the full lottery reserve before it splits anything:

main pool = advertised pool − (prize per draw × number of draws)

The draw count comes from the competition's own duration. A daily lottery over a fourteen-day competition is fourteen draws; a weekly one is the duration rounded up into weeks. So a $3,000 pool with a $25 daily draw over fourteen days is a $2,650 leaderboard pool and $350 of raffle.

This is the number most commonly misread. If a page shows you a projection that seems small relative to the headline pool, the lottery reserve is usually why.

Note that the reserve is what the schedule plans to draw, not what has been drawn. A draw that never fires because nobody qualified that day still shows up in the reserve the projection subtracts. In entry-fee challenges, settlement reconciles this automatically against the draws that actually paid; in volume competitions the final numbers are confirmed at payout.

Step two: filter to the eligible field

Every entry is tested against the competition's qualifying rules before any money is allocated. A row that fails any of them is not in the split at all.

The order matters for a reason that is easy to miss: the eligible field, not the registered field, is what gets divided. In a pro-rata competition, everyone who fails a filter has their share redistributed among everyone who passed. A high qualifying minimum does not just exclude people — it concentrates the pool on whoever cleared it.

Step three: split by mode

There are two distribution modes and they behave nothing alike.

Pro rata

your reward = main pool × your points ÷ total points of the eligible field

That is the whole rule. It is continuous — 10% more points is 10% more money — and it pays everyone who qualifies. If the eligible field has zero total points, nothing is projected, because there is nothing to divide by.

Pro rata is the mode where projections are most useful mid-competition, because the function is smooth. The projection tells you the marginal value of your next dollar of volume with reasonable precision.

Leaderboard tiers

The creator publishes a table of positions and percentages — 50/30/20 across the top three, say, or 40/25/15/12/8 across the top five. Eligible entries are sorted by rank, positions are assigned, and each position takes its stated share of the pool.

reward at position p = main pool × tier percentage at p ÷ 100

Positions with no tier get nothing. Ties are handled explicitly: where several rows share a rank, the tier percentages covering those positions are pooled and split equally between them, so two traders tied for a first place worth 50% and a second worth 30% take 40% each rather than one arbitrarily taking the larger cheque.

Tier mode makes projections jumpy. Your projected number does not move at all as you gain points inside a rank, and then changes discontinuously when you cross someone. That is a property of the payout structure, not a bug in the projection.

Percentage-of-field buckets

Challenges support a third shape: instead of fixed ranks, the creator names slices of the field. "The top 10% share 60% of the pool; the rest of the top half share 40%."

The winner count cannot be known until the field is known, so it resolves against the final eligible count:

cumulative winners for a bucket = max(1, floor(field size × topPercent ÷ 100))

Floor, so everyone counted as a winner genuinely sits inside the stated slice. The max(1) is the exception, because a bucket that resolved to zero winners would strand its share of the pool — "top 10%" of a four-person field still crowns the leader.

Inside a bucket the share does not split equally. It decays down the ranks on a poker-tournament curve, weighting rank p by p^-0.8, so first place takes roughly 1.74× second. The shape is top-heavy at the head but keeps a long paying tail: the last paid seat of a hundred-strong "top 50%" still gets a visible cheque rather than dust. A final smoothing pass guarantees no lower rank ever pays more than a higher one, which can leave flat bands deep in the tail — itself authentic tournament structure.

One consequence worth knowing as a creator: where that smoothing flattens a bucket boundary, a bucket's actual cut can move away from its stated share. A "spread it wide" config of 20% to the top tenth and 80% to the top half pays the top bucket around 29% at a thousand entrants, not 20%. Any surface that shows per-bucket shares alongside a live field has to read the resolved number, not echo the config.

Why a projection shows a dash

A dash is not an error. It is the projection declining to state a number it cannot compute honestly. The specific causes:

• You are not eligible. Zero volume, below the volume floor, below the points threshold, short of the trade count, or missing a required connection.
• There is no pool to split. The pool is zero, or the lottery reserve consumes all of it.
• Your rank is outside the tiers. In tier mode, positions with no tier are projected as nothing — correctly, because they will be paid nothing.
• The competition has requirements the projection cannot verify. Where a competition sets a minimum trade size, a minimum deposit, or a minimum hold duration, projections are suppressed for the entire competition. Those rules are enforced at settlement against data the leaderboard rollup does not carry, so projecting anything would mean showing a number that settlement might not honour. Showing nothing is the honest answer.

That last one surprises people. A whole competition showing dashes usually means it carries one of those three requirements, not that it is broken.

What a projection is not

It is a snapshot of a moving field. Three things change it without you doing anything:

• New entrants dilute pro-rata shares. Your points stay the same, the denominator grows.
• Someone passing you in tier mode moves your entire cheque, not a fraction of it.
• Bucket boundaries move as the field grows. The top 10% of eighty entrants is eight seats; at a hundred and twenty it is twelve, and the twelfth seat is being paid from the same pool.

The number is honest about the present and says nothing about the future. Treat it as a marginal-value signal, not a forecast.

Getting paid

Settlement freezes the standings at the end, runs any draws still owed, then splits what the lottery did not take across the eligible field using the same functions described above. Rewards are written per participant and paid against those records. For challenges, payout is a manual USDC transfer on Base against the settled reward rows — deliberately, so a settlement error is caught by a human before money moves rather than after.

See the FAQ for claim and payout detail, browse live competitions to read real projections, or start with the complete guide to trading competitions if you are picking one to enter.