Most platforms that handle your money ask you to trust them. Trust that they'll pay out when you win. Trust that the prize pool is real. Trust that nobody touched the funds between entry and distribution.
We didn't want to build another platform you have to trust. So we didn't.
The problem with centralised prize pools
On a traditional competition platform, the flow looks something like this: you deposit funds, a company holds them, a company decides the winner, a company sends you your prize. Every step requires trust in that company — that they're solvent, that they're honest, that they'll process your withdrawal in a reasonable timeframe.
This works fine until it doesn't. And in crypto, it has stopped working more times than anyone should be comfortable with.
What we put on-chain — and why
When you enter a TradeIt competition, your entry fee goes directly to a smart contract. Not a company wallet. Not a multisig controlled by the team. A smart contract with publicly verifiable logic.
That contract does three things:
Collects entry fees. Every participant pays into the same contract. The prize pool is transparent and verifiable by anyone at any time.
Takes a protocol fee. A small percentage goes to the protocol — this is how TradeIt sustains itself. This percentage is defined in the contract, not decided unilaterally after the fact.
Distributes prizes. When a competition ends and final rankings are submitted, prizes become claimable directly from the contract. No manual approval. No waiting for a team member to process a withdrawal. If you won, you can claim. That's it.
This means you never have to trust us with your money. The contract enforces the rules, not TradeIt.
Why we didn't put everything on-chain
This is the part most platforms don't talk about honestly.
Every trade on-chain means a gas fee. Every order placed, every position adjusted, every stop-loss triggered — each one would require a transaction and a fee. In an active competition where traders are making dozens of moves, that cost adds up fast. It would make the platform unusable for anyone not willing to spend more on gas than they could win in prizes.
There's also latency. On-chain transactions take time to confirm. In a fast-moving market, that delay matters. A trading competition where you have to wait for block confirmations between orders isn't really a trading competition — it's a waiting game.
So trades, orders, and positions live off-chain in our database. They execute instantly, cost nothing, and reflect real market prices. You get the experience of trading without the friction of the chain.
The right things in the right places
The architecture is a deliberate choice, not a compromise.
Off-chain where speed and cost matter: trade execution, order management, PnL calculation, leaderboards.
On-chain where trust and transparency matter: entry fees, prize pools, payouts.
You shouldn't have to pay gas to place a limit order. But you should be able to verify on-chain that the prize pool exists, that the rules are encoded in a contract, and that your winnings can't be withheld.
That's the line we drew. We think it's the right one.
Verifying it yourself
Every competition contract is publicly deployed and verifiable. You don't have to take our word for any of this — the code is there to read.
We believe that in the long run, the platforms that survive in crypto are the ones that don't ask for trust they haven't earned. Smart contracts don't lie. We'd rather be held to that standard than ask you to trust us.
Come compete. The prize pool is on-chain. So is our word.