Getting paid

This page is for a trader who has passed and holds a funded seat. It covers what you can take out, when you can take it, who has to agree, and one cost of the design that is worth knowing about before you rely on it.

#The short version

Your seat starts at its payout basis, which is the capital that was loaded into it. Anything above that is profit. At any moment when you have nothing open you can take that profit out, on your own signature, and the split is:

Those three shares are the terms your seat was opened under, not a standing policy. They are written into the seat account when it is funded, they are checked against the published record your challenge was sold under, and no later edit to any table moves them. An account published tomorrow may split differently; your seat keeps this one for as long as it exists.

The pool's row is 0% and that is deliberate rather than an omission. The people whose capital stands behind a seat are not paid out of what you make; there is no arrangement in which trading well costs you more, and no arrangement in which trading badly costs them their principal. What they earn comes from elsewhere in the business, and this page will describe it when that side is built.

You choose the amount, and there is one bound on it. If your seat is on a scaling ladder, each level has an amount of equity you have to keep in the seat to hold that level. Everything above that line is yours to take. A claim that would take the seat below the line is refused on chain rather than paid out, so a withdrawal can never cost you a level: nothing is taken and nothing is forfeited, the money stays in your seat and is claimable again the moment you are above the line. At the bottom level the line is zero, so the whole profit is claimable.

There is no minimum, no waiting period, no approval step and nobody to ask. You sign the claim yourself.

#When you can claim

Two conditions, and both are checked by the program rather than by a person.

You must be flat. No open position on the seat. The reason is honest rather than procedural: while a position is open, your seat's value is whatever the venue currently says the outcome tokens are worth, and the program has no way to know that without trusting a price feed. When you are flat, your seat's value is simply the cash in it, which the program can read. The rounds you trade run in minutes, so the wait is short. If Fortell ever lists longer-dated markets, this becomes worth revisiting, and that is the stated trigger for doing so.

There must be profit. The claimable amount is your seat's cash minus its payout basis, and never more than the amount that leaves your level's hold line intact. If that is zero or negative there is nothing to claim, and the program says so rather than paying out nothing.

#Nobody at Fortell can stall it

The signature that authorises a claim is yours. Not an admin's, not an operator's. No Fortell key can approve, delay or refuse your claim, because no Fortell key is in the instruction at all.

The reason this is worth saying out loud is that "when do I actually get paid" is the loudest complaint in prop trading, and every firm's answer is a policy. A policy can change. This one is an on-chain program, and the only way to change it is to replace the program, in public.

#After your seat's grace window, anyone can trigger your claim

If your seat has sat with nothing open for longer than its grace window, any wallet may submit the claim instruction for it. That window is a term of your own seat rather than a setting somebody can change under you: it is written onto the seat account when it is funded, it is part of the record your challenge was sold under, and it is 48 hours on the account this site sells today. Read it off your own seat rather than trusting this sentence.

That sounds like a weakening and it is the opposite of one. Every destination in a claim is fixed on the seat itself: your share goes to your address, the fee goes to the treasury address written on the seat, the backer share goes to the pool address written on the seat. A stranger calling it cannot redirect a cent. All they can do is cause the same split split to happen that you would have caused.

It exists because a trader who walks away would otherwise leave their own claim sitting in a dormant seat forever.

#Profit you have not claimed is still at risk

This is the part people get wrong. Money sitting in your seat above the tier size is equity, not a balance owed to you. It is exposed exactly like the rest of the seat.

Up $200 and then down $125 leaves you $75 of profit, not $200.

The alternative, setting profit aside every time you make a new high, sounds friendlier and is worse for everyone. A seat that ran up $200 and then gave it all back would have paid out $180 while Fortell's buffer absorbed the entire $200 loss. Payouts rather than losses would be what drains the protection that makes the seat possible.

#Claiming does not buy you more room to lose

When you claim, three things move together in the same transaction: your seat's cash, its drawdown high-water mark and its daily reference point all come down to where the claim left the seat.

The drawdown reset is in your favour. Without it, a seat that ran up and was then claimed back down would keep the floor its old peak had earned, and the next ordinary trade would freeze a seat that had done nothing wrong.

The daily reset runs the other way, on purpose. It moves your daily reference down to your current equity, which shrinks the room you have left to lose in the UTC day that is currently running rather than extending it. You cannot claim your way into a bigger daily allowance.

#The cost of this design, stated plainly

Claim-to-tier-size has two costs. Both were accepted deliberately and both are real.

A seat at the bottom level never builds a cushion. In a model where profit accumulates, a trader who is up $150 has $150 of their own money standing in front of Fortell's first-loss buffer. At the bottom level that money leaves as soon as you claim, so the buffer is the entire protection. In exchange your drawdown floor never ratchets up, which means the most such a seat can ever lose stays fixed at the cover reserved for it. Those two facts are the same fact, and the hold line above is what breaks the trade once a seat has scaled: from the first level up, the equity you must keep is more than the capital in the seat, so the claim that would give Fortell's protection back is the one the program refuses.

You are paid on the peaks of your equity curve, not on where it ends up. Being able to harvest at any flat point is worth more than being paid at the end, because the highest point a curve reaches is always at least where it finishes. A trader with no real edge can still collect on noise, and Fortell's buffer pays for that.

Worked through, on a seat at the bottom level with a basis of $250 and the full $250 of cover reserved behind it:

Basis $250, buffer reserved $250, hold line $0.
Equity runs to $350. You claim the $100:
    $90 to you, $10 to Fortell, $0 to the pool
    the seat, its high-water mark and its daily reference all come back to $250
Equity then falls to $0, which is the drawdown floor. The seat freezes and closes.
    the pool gets its principal back in full
    the $250 loss is absorbed by Fortell's buffer, in full

You:      +$90
Backers:  +$0 from this seat's trading, and no principal lost
Fortell:  -$250 buffer, +$10 fee = -$240

That is the bottom level, and it is the worst case for Fortell by construction. One level up the hold line is above the basis, so the same $100 could not have been taken all the way down.

Two things bound that without eliminating it: the risk rails bound how volatile a seat can be, and therefore how large the harvest can get, and the pass criteria select for traders whose curves actually drift upward. Neither makes the cost zero. If it shows up in the numbers, the correction will be a retention rule, meaning you must leave some percentage of profit in the seat, and not a waiting period. A waiting period would be aimed at a risk problem the rails already handle.

#Where each share lands

• Yours goes to your own token account. Nobody else's address is a legal destination.

• Fortell's 10% goes to the treasury, which is itself governed by a multisig and a timelocked withdrawal queue.

• The pool's share - 0% under the terms above, so nothing moves on this leg today. The instruction still routes it, because the split is configuration and a record may be published with a positive share; when it is, that amount is paid into the shared pool, which raises the value of every backer's share at once. There is no per-backer bookkeeping to go wrong.

#What you can check afterwards

Every claim emits a record on chain carrying the amount claimed, all three legs, and the seat's value before and after. Your seat account also carries a running lifetime total and a claim count, so "how much has this seat paid out" is one lookup rather than a trawl through history.

Three things are worth checking on a claim you care about:

1. The three legs add up to exactly the profit claimed. Any shortfall would mean the split arithmetic changed.

2. The seat's value afterwards is at or above your level's hold line. Below it, the program would have refused the claim.

3. The high-water mark afterwards equals the seat's value. If it were higher, the seat would be one trade away from a freeze it did not earn.

Checking it yourself has the addresses and the method.