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 tier size, $500 or $1,500. Anything above that is profit. At any moment when you have nothing open, you can take all of it, and the split is:

The seat then sits at its tier size again, exactly as it did on the day it was funded.

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 tier size. 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 48 hours flat, anyone can trigger your claim

If your seat has sat with nothing open for 48 hours, any wallet may submit the claim instruction for it.

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 70/10/20 split to happen that you would have caused.

It exists because a trader who walks away would otherwise leave the backers' 20% 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 $140 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 reset together in the same transaction: your seat's cash, its drawdown high-water mark and its daily reference point all return to the tier size.

The drawdown reset is in your favour. Without it, a seat that ran to $700 would keep its floor at $525 after you took equity back down to $500, and your next 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.

Your seat 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. Here that money leaves as soon as you claim, so the buffer is always the entire protection. In exchange, your drawdown floor never ratchets up, which means the most a seat can ever lose stays fixed at the buffer that was reserved for it. Those two facts are the same fact.

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 with the real numbers on a Standard seat:

Seat $500, buffer reserved $125.
Equity runs to $600. You claim $100:
    $70 to you, $10 to Fortell, $20 to the pool
    the seat, its high-water mark and its daily reference all reset to $500
Equity then falls to $375, which is the drawdown floor. The seat freezes and closes.
    the pool gets back $375 of its $500
    the $125 loss is absorbed by Fortell's buffer, in full

You:      +$70
Backers:  +$20
Fortell:  -$125 buffer, +$10 fee = -$115

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 backers' 20% 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 equals its tier size. Any other number means the claim was not to tier size.

3. The high-water mark afterwards equals that same number. 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.