What happens when you pass
A pass is not a message. It is a sequence of things that happen on chain, unattended, and you can watch all of them.
The sequence
A seat is created for you. A dedicated Solana account, one per funded trader, whose address is determined by your own wallet. It is not shared with anyone.
Its risk limits are written. The same limits you traded the challenge under, for the tier you actually passed.
Capital is moved into it. $500 or $1,500 of real money, from the shared pool that backers deposit into.
Those three steps run without a human approving them, and step 3 refuses to run if step 2 did not, so capital cannot land in a seat whose limits are still unset.
At the same time, the entry fee you paid stops being revenue and becomes cover. It is converted into first-loss protection sitting in the pool, reserved specifically against your seat. The first-loss buffer covers what that means.
Who holds the money
Not Fortell, and not you.
The seat holds it. The seat is a program account, and the only thing that can authorise a movement out of it is the seat's own program-derived address, which is not a key anybody owns. There is no private key for it anywhere, at Fortell or otherwise.
You are named on the seat as its trader, and that name grants exactly one power: you can trigger a trade, which the seat's own address then signs. You cannot transfer out of it. No Fortell key can either. The destinations money can go to are fixed on the seat when it is created and no instruction changes them afterwards:
| Where money can go | Fixed to |
|---|---|
| your share of a profit claim | your own account |
| Fortell's fee | the treasury account written on the seat |
| the backers' share | the pool account written on the seat |
| returning capital when the seat closes | that same pool account, and nowhere else |
This is why "who submits the transaction" does not matter and why nobody at Fortell can stall your payout. The destinations are not arguments a caller chooses.
No off-chain Fortell service holds a user key. Your wallet signs. The service that runs the site can, for embedded wallets, pay the network fee on a transaction you have signed, and it can only do that for a fixed list of Fortell's own programs.
What you can trade
One venue, today.
You trade BTC Up or Down rounds on Jupiter Forecast, through the on-chain market maker that Forecast routes to. Rounds run for minutes rather than days. The outcome tokens are backed by USDC and settle from a Chainlink BTC/USD price feed.
The reason this venue and not another is not a commercial arrangement. It is that this one can be traded by a program account with a single signature and no third party in the loop. Fortell established that by executing a real trade and inspecting what it required, rather than by reading a document. A venue that needs a keeper, a co-signer or an off-chain API key cannot be traded by a seat at all, whatever anyone's intentions.
Your seat holds USDC and the outcome tokens for the rounds you are in. Nothing else.
Why your challenge only lists that venue too
One rule, enforced in software: a challenge may only list markets a funded seat could trade.
If a challenge listed a market a seat cannot touch, you would spend two weeks and $75 building a track record on something you can never do with real money. Markets on venues a seat cannot reach, Polymarket among them, are therefore not listed in a challenge, and an order against one is refused rather than quietly scored at zero. That refusal is checked against the list the on-chain program itself enforces, so the two cannot drift apart.
Selling is deliberately never blocked by this rule. If a market ever stops being listable while you are holding a position in it, you can still get out.
What freezes a seat
If your seat's value ever sits below its drawdown floor at a moment when you have nothing open, it freezes. A frozen seat can still close positions and can never open new ones, and the freeze does not lift.
Separately, a buy that could put you below the floor is refused before it happens, which is what makes the freeze rare. The floor check runs on the worst case: if this position went to zero, where would the seat be.
What ends a seat
Your seat's capital returns to the pool, and any loss is absorbed by Fortell's reserved cover before it can reach the pool's own money. The program refuses to settle a losing seat at all unless that cover is fully there, so there is no version of this where a shortfall quietly lands on backers.
Profit you had not claimed is not swept away with the capital. Anyone may trigger the 70/10/20 split on a seat that has been flat for 48 hours, precisely so a trader who walks away does not strand the backers' share.
What is not recorded anywhere
Stated plainly, because it is easy to assume otherwise.
There is no history of your seat. Nothing writes down what your seat held last Tuesday. Current state is readable at any time, straight off the chain, and individual transactions are in the chain's own history, but there is no index that will answer a question about a past moment. If you want a record of your own seat over time, keep it yourself.