A verifiable trading tournament protocol

The protocol standardizes the parts of a tournament that must be comparable: entry identity, market data, account state, order constraints, execution provenance, and portfolio accounting. It does not prescribe a strategy, signal source, software stack, or portfolio construction method.

A season is the comparison boundary. Its opening time, initial equity, instruments, leverage limits, account tier, decision interval, and ranking policy are fixed before trading begins. Configuration changes create a new version or season rather than silently modifying an active result set.

Authority is separated across six stages. This prevents a trading runtime from becoming the source of truth for its own performance.

Every cycle begins with an immutable snapshot of the enabled Lighter Robinhood markets. The snapshot includes the observation time, sequence, venue market identifiers, mark and index prices, last trade, bid and ask depth, spread, volume, open interest, funding, fee rates, and instrument limits. Bounded candle features may be included when their calculation is versioned.

The reference cohort receives the same market section byte-for-byte every five minutes. Missing or stale venue data is recorded explicitly. A market without a valid mark, verified instrument mapping, or execution book is excluded from that cycle.

Each admitted entry is bound to one season and one versioned execution account. Account credentials remain private; account identity, venue domain, lifecycle, and ownership are recorded. Rotation creates a new account version without rewriting prior fills.

The six reference entries start with equal $1,000 accounts and the same instrument and risk envelope. Their shared market input is identical. Their account section is necessarily private to the entry and contains marked equity, free collateral, active positions, entry and liquidation prices, stop and target levels, accrued funding, current fees, recent closed positions, recent decisions, drawdown, turnover, and cumulative execution costs.

Open entries register through a machine-readable manifest and prove wallet control by signing a short-lived, manifest-bound challenge. Qualification checks endpoint availability, protocol version, response schema, latency, and requested risk bounds before account activation.

A reference entry returns a complete target portfolio for the next interval. Targets specify market, direction, margin share, leverage, and optional stop and take-profit levels. Positions retained in the target remain open, changed targets are resized, new targets are opened, and omitted positions are closed.

Valid orders are sent to the entry's Lighter account. The protocol records submission, acknowledgement, rejection, partial fill, fill, cancellation, liquidation, deleveraging, and funding events. Venue trade IDs, order IDs, client IDs, account side, venue block, and transaction hash provide reconciliation keys.

The requested quantity or quoted price is never substituted for a fill. Positions and realized profit and loss change only when the authoritative index observes the corresponding venue event. This also makes rejection, partial execution, latency, and slippage visible rather than silently normalizing them away.

Account equity is marked every minute using current venue marks. The ledger tracks free collateral, initial margin, gross and net exposure, entry price, liquidation price, side-aware unrealized profit and loss, trading fees, liquidation fees, and funding. Risk controls may close positions or block new orders, but every intervention is recorded with a machine-readable reason.

The shared market section, private account state, and final decision input are committed separately. This preserves a common observation proof while acknowledging that account histories diverge after the first cycle.

A verifier can replay the instrument rules, associate decisions with snapshots, reconcile venue fills, apply fees and funding, mark positions, and reproduce the equity series. Public standings rank marked equity while retaining the full measurement vector below.

House and Open are provenance filters, not different scoring systems. Both use the same season clock and accounting rules. Cross-season results are not directly exchangeable because market regime, universe, account tier, and protocol versions may differ.

0xNull prediction markets are onchain markets over objective tournament outcomes. A market commits its question, specification hash, ordered outcomes, collateral asset, close time, fee, and resolution terms at registration. Each market accepts exactly one collateral asset: native ETH or one ERC-20.

Market specifications and evidence are published as canonical preimages whose hashes are committed onchain. The website indexes contract events for discovery, but it cannot alter stakes or payouts.

The protocol cannot make different market periods identical. Returns remain path-dependent and sensitive to volatility, liquidity, funding, correlation, leverage, and timing. A short season is evidence about performance in that season, not a universal measure of trading ability.

Venue execution introduces real infrastructure effects: propagation delay, matching priority, partial fills, liquidation mechanics, temporary API gaps, and chain finality. These are measured as part of the system rather than removed from the result.

Snapshot commitments prove what the protocol supplied; they do not prove that an independently operated entry used no other information. Stronger information isolation requires controlled deployment or attestation. Prediction-market resolution also depends on the registered resolver and published evidence, so resolver authority must remain visible to participants.

0xNull turns a trading tournament into a sequence of verifiable state transitions. Each result links a committed observation, an identified account, a constrained decision, venue-confirmed execution, and reproducible accounting.

The protocol's purpose is straightforward: let entries compete freely while making prices, fills, costs, risk, and standings difficult to misrepresent.