REVENUE MODEL

The protocol funds itself the same way a prop firm does: charge for evaluation, charge for execution, share the profit with the people who pass. The rest of this page covers each cash line — what it earns, where it lands, and who can move it.

#Revenue sources

• Challenge packs. $49 Starter, $99 Growth, $199 Swing, $299 Elite. One-time fee, no subscription. The price buys an evaluation window with fixed rules: +10% profit target, -4% daily loss cap, -8% total drawdown. A pack either passes into a funded account or expires.
• Perp trading fees. 0.020% maker, 0.060% taker, charged on notional. Depth-adding orders earn a -0.005% rebate. Funded accounts pay the same schedule as anyone else — there is no funded subsidy, so leaderboard PnL stays comparable across cohorts.
• Funding admin slice. Funding is a peer-to-peer transfer between longs and shorts; the protocol keeps 1% only on settled funding above $1,000 within a single 8-hour window. Below that threshold the rate is zero. This is the only path funding touches treasury.
• Liquidation residual. Maintenance margin remaining after the loss is paid splits 50% to the keeper bounty, 50% to the insurance reserve. It is a defense rail, not a growth line — the reserve grows fastest when the venue is healthy enough that liquidations close cleanly inside margin.

Pack revenue funds the prop layer — challenge engine, oracle redundancy, payout pipeline. Trading fees fund matching, settlement, and the read model. The insurance reserve backstops accounts that liquidate through their margin. No line cross-subsidizes another beyond the published splits.

#Payout rails

• Trader profit-share, 90 / 10. Funded accounts realize PnL with 90% to the trader and 10% to the protocol. Withdrawals are requested in the cashier and settle in USDC on Base, target under 24 hours once Sumsub-class KYC clears. The split is contract-bounded and identical for every funded wallet.
• Leaderboard prize pool. Each season carries a fixed pool paid across two boards — Season Rank (skill-weighted) and Points Rank (cumulative XP) — with brackets at #1, #2–3, #4–10, #11–50, and the top 100. The pool is sized at season open from pack revenue and never from trader profit-share; bracket payouts are published before the season starts and cannot move mid-season.
• Referral cash, 8% + 4%. Every paid pack a referee buys pays 8% to the upstream wallet, with a further 4% activity bonus accruing as the referee trades. Payouts batch monthly to KYC-cleared wallets and post as Base transactions the moment they leave treasury — the address, amount, and txid are all public.
• Insurance reserve. 50% of every liquidation residual flows into a dedicated contract address, not a treasury EOA. The reserve absorbs the first dollar of an underwater account before any other capital is touched. The balance is queryable on-chain at any block; growth and draws are visible to anyone.

#Balance separation

Dexter keeps five distinct balance classes — four on-chain in separate contract addresses, one off-chain at the regulated payment processor. They do not commingle and they cannot fund each other off-protocol.

• User collateral vault. Holds active trading margin. Withdrawals are paid from this vault and only this vault — operating treasury cannot top it up and cannot draw from it.
• Insurance reserve. Funded by the 50% liquidation residual. Drawn only when a liquidation breaches position margin. No discretionary spend; movements out require the 3-of-5 governance multi-sig with an external signer.
• Treasury operating wallet. Holds the protocol's share of trading fees plus the 1% funding admin slice. Covers infrastructure, payroll, leaderboard refills, and the on-chain ops budget. Subject to the 2-of-3 ops multi-sig above $10,000.
• Reward pool. Pre-funded at season open with the published leaderboard prize pool and the referral float. Drawn down as ranks settle and referrals mature. Intra-season top-ups require a 3-of-5 governance signature so the bracket cannot be quietly inflated mid-season.
• Fiat ramp, off-chain. Holds card, Apple Pay, and Google Pay pack purchases for 1–2 days before they convert to USDC and post to the operating wallet. Crypto pack purchases skip this rail entirely.

The rule is single-fault isolation. A KYC dispute on the fiat ramp cannot delay a withdrawal, because withdrawals settle from the collateral vault. An insurance draw never touches operating treasury. A slow trading month does not change the published leaderboard brackets, because the reward pool was sized and funded before the season opened.

#Treasury controls

Movements above $10,000 from the operating wallet require a 2-of-3 multi-sig. Movements out of the insurance reserve require a 3-of-5 multi-sig with at least one external signer who is not on the Dexter cap table. The season-open reward pool refill rides the same 2-of-3; any intra-season refill switches to the 3-of-5 governance flow. The challenge rules and the funded split — +10% / -4% / -8% and 90 / 10 — are wired into the v1 contract, not into a governable parameter, so no signature combination can rewrite them mid-season.

Every multi-sig transaction posts to Base. The contract addresses for each vault are listed on the security page; the season-open and season-close refills are linked from the leaderboard footer. Anyone can verify the cash sitting in each pool at any block, in any explorer, without asking Dexter for a number.