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

1. 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.

2. Its risk limits are written. The same limits you traded the challenge under, for the account you actually passed.

3. Capital is moved into it. 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:

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 per account. Which one was fixed when you bought the challenge.

On the prediction account 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.

On the stocks account you trade nine US stocks as cash-settled perpetuals on Phoenix, long only and without leverage, chosen by the same test: the seat's own account executed real round trips there with a single signature. The $10,000 notional account on US stocks has the names, the price you are held to and what a fill costs. That seat holds USDC, and its collateral and positions at the venue. 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 $79 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

Two limits freeze a seat, and this page used to name only one. Both are checked at the same moment - when you go flat - and both have the same effect.

The drawdown floor. If your seat's value ever sits below it at a moment when you have nothing open, the seat freezes.

The daily loss limit. If a window's loss reaches that window's limit, the seat freezes too, and this is the part worth reading twice: a daily breach does not expire with the day. There is no bucket-scoped freeze in the program - no field, no clock, no roll that returns the seat. A seat frozen on the daily limit is finished exactly as one frozen on the drawdown floor is.

A frozen seat can still close positions, can never open new ones, and the freeze does not lift. That last part is literal: nothing you trade clears it, and the only thing that can is a governance action we take by hand, which is there for our own mistakes rather than for yours.

Reaching the daily limit is breaching it. Down exactly the limit, the seat freezes - the window rolling gives you nothing back, because there is nothing left to give back. The two rails now have one shape: you may trade right up to the line, and landing on it ends the run.

That changed on 23 August 2026. Until then, down exactly the limit left you out of room for the window and nothing else had happened, and the day failed one cent past it. The reason it moved is that one cent past it was not reachable: no order the seat admits takes you there, so the published limit could never actually be crossed.

The window's limit is half of what you start the day with, not a fixed figure. There is no fixed-dollar daily field on a seat at all: the program takes the balance your seat is flat at when the window opens and allows half of it to be lost. That trails your account in both directions - $250 on the morning you are funded gives $125, $350 after banking $100 gives $175, and $150 after losing $100 gives $75. Half of what you actually hold is the same rule at every size, and the cost of it is that a bad day charges you twice: once in the loss, and once in a smaller allowance the next morning.

Separately, a buy that could put you below the drawdown floor is refused before it happens, which is what makes that freeze rare. The floor check runs on the worst case: if this position went to zero, where would the seat be.

On day one that floor is at zero, so on day one it refuses nothing. The floor sits a fixed distance below the highest your seat has ever been worth, and the morning you are funded that peak is the money you were funded with - so the floor is that money minus the same amount, which is nothing. That is the first-loss cover read backwards rather than a gap: the cover IS the maximum a seat can lose, and a floor that bit on day one would make the cover smaller than it says it is. Until you are in profit it is the daily rule above that paces you, and every dollar of profit you hold lifts the peak and the floor with it.

The daily rail works the same way, and there is one thing about it you should know. A buy is admitted if its worst case clears the window's floor - exactly that floor, with nothing added. So the largest order the seat will take is the one whose worst case lands your window ON the limit, and your seat will accept an order whose worst case ends it. The terminal says so on the ticket, before you commit, rather than letting you find it in a fill.

Until 23 August 2026 the daily rail was looser than the drawdown one: a buy was admitted if its worst case cleared the floor less one round cap - one trade of overshoot, on purpose, because the daily limit was read as a pacing rule rather than a capital one. That allowance is gone. It let a seat finish a window further down than the number the product publishes, which is a different rule from the one on the page.

#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 same 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.