Every rule, every formula, and every thing that can go wrong. If a mechanism is only convincing when it is vague, it is not a mechanism.
LADDER is a trading competition on Robinhood Chain that runs forever in 5 day seasons. Entry is free, you trade whatever you want from your own wallet, and the wallet with the best profit over the season takes the pot.
Three properties define it, and everything else in this paper follows from them.
Trading competitions are everywhere and none of them are checkable. An exchange runs one, an exchange declares a winner, and the entire result rests on the exchange being honest about numbers only it can see. The leaderboard is a screenshot of a private database.
The second problem is size. Almost every competition ranks on absolute profit, so the largest account wins by default and everyone else is decoration. A leaderboard that a small trader cannot win is not a competition, it is an advertisement.
The third problem is proof of payment. Plenty of leaderboards have crowned a winner. Far fewer have published the transaction that paid them.
A public chain solves the first problem completely, because trades are already public and a score computed from them can be recomputed by anybody. It solves the third problem too, because a payout is a transaction with a hash. It does not solve the second, and it introduces a new one: on a chain you can trade against yourself, so a profit can be manufactured. Chapter six is about that.
| Step | What happens |
|---|---|
| Enter | You submit a wallet address on the site. It is free, instant, and requires no signature. You are in from that moment. |
| Trade | You trade any token on Robinhood Chain from that wallet, in whatever size and at whatever moment you like, for 5 days. |
| Score | The league recomputes every entrant from onchain trades on a cycle and publishes the table live. |
| Settle | At the buzzer the table freezes. The top wallet is recorded together with the pot size at that moment. |
| Pay | The operator sends 70 percent of the pot by hand from the dev wallet and publishes the transaction hash. |
| Roll | The remaining 30 percent carries into the next season, which has already started. Entrants carry over automatically. |
You enter once. You are in every following season without doing anything, because a league that makes people re register every 5 days has no league in it.
Score is mark to market profit over the season window, in dollars, summed across every token you traded inside it.
Only positions opened inside the season count. If you bought a token last month and sell it during this season, that sale is not season performance and it is excluded. Your row is flagged pre_season_sells so the exclusion is visible rather than silent.
Where a position is partly pre season, the in window proportion is kept and the rest is dropped, rather than throwing away the whole token.
Positions still open at the buzzer are valued at the last traded price. This matters: you are not forced to sell to score, so the competition does not turn into a race to dump on the final hour. If a token has no usable price the row is flagged unpriced_open.
Ranked on total profit, then on return on capital, then on volume. The tie breakers almost never matter and they exist so the order is deterministic.
Ranking on absolute profit favours large accounts. We are aware of it, and it is the first thing that changes if the league gets enough entrants to support divisions by account size. Divisions with five people in them are worse than no divisions, so this stays as it is until the numbers justify it.
$LADDER carries a trading fee on buys and sells. That fee accumulates in one wallet. That wallet is the pot. The figure on the front page is read live from its balance, which means anybody can open an explorer and check the number against the chain.
At the buzzer the pot is split.
The carry exists so the pot never starts a season at zero. Without it, season one is the only season with a prize worth entering and the league dies in a fortnight. With it, the pot compounds across seasons and a quiet week still leaves something on the table for the next one.
The system records the winner and the amount. It sends nothing. The operator reads the final table, sends the payout from the dev wallet, and posts the transaction hash.
Automating it would mean this server holds a key that can move the pot. It does not, and it will not. The cost of that choice is real and it is stated plainly: a payout can take hours rather than landing in the same block, and it depends on one person doing what they said they would. The transaction hash published every season is the only thing that makes that promise checkable, which is exactly why it is published every season.
Pot wallet: 0xF384b689EC7646e7EDdEc0C3A7Af53B5e9E3DFc3
Entrants may trade anything. That is a real design choice and it has a real cost: on a chain with thin liquidity you can create a token, trade against yourself at rising prices, and print a profit that never existed.
The answer is not a whitelist. A whitelist would mean the league decides which tokens are legitimate, which is a worse problem than the one it solves. The answer is that manufactured profit is visible on the table rather than hidden.
| Flag | What it means |
|---|---|
| thin_book | Profit made on one or two tokens with almost no capital actually deployed. The classic shape of a printed number. |
| cluster | Other entrants repeatedly buy the same tokens as this wallet within a short window. Coordination, whether it is a group or one person. |
| same_funder | Several entrants received their first ether from the same wallet. The strongest evidence that a group of entries is one person. |
| pre_season_sells | Part of the activity was a position opened before the season and has been excluded from the score. |
Flags do not disqualify anybody automatically. A flagged first place is reviewed before a payout is sent, and if it is thrown out the reason is published with the season result.
Someone entering ten wallets and taking ten different gambles is the obvious way to attack a competition like this, and no amount of trade analysis catches it. What catches it is money: those ten wallets had to be paid for, and on a public chain the payment is visible.
For every entrant the league reads the earliest inbound transfer to that address, both ordinary and internal, and records who sent it. Entrants sharing a funder are flagged same_funder with the size of the group.
One correction matters more than the rest, because without it this method produces nonsense. Exchange hot wallets, bridges and faucets pay for thousands of unrelated people. Any funder above a threshold is treated as infrastructure and excluded, so sharing a bridge proves nothing and sharing a personal wallet proves a lot.
Roughly one wallet in six cannot be attributed at all: its first visible movement is outbound, so the funding happened somewhere this method does not reach. Those rows carry no flag, and a missing flag is not a clean bill of health.
Someone who funds each wallet from a different exchange withdrawal defeats this completely. It raises the cost of attacking the league; it does not make it impossible. The pot grows as the graph fills, not before.
$LADDER does exactly one thing: its trading fee funds the pot. That is the whole mechanism and there is nothing else hiding behind it.
Being direct about what it is not matters more than what it is.
The relationship runs one way. Activity in the token builds the prize. A bigger prize makes the competition worth entering. More entrants make the league more worth watching. That loop can turn, and it can also fail to turn. It is a mechanism, not a guarantee.
Written plainly, because a risk section that only lists things that cannot happen is worthless.
| Risk | Where it stands |
|---|---|
| Operator risk | Payouts depend on one person sending them. The published transaction hash each season is the only proof, and a missing hash is the signal to stop entering. |
| Multi wallet entry | The funding graph catches groups paid for by one wallet. It does not catch someone funding each entry from a separate exchange withdrawal, so the pot still grows slowly and on purpose. |
| Empty pot | If the token sees no volume the pot barely grows and the prize is not worth competing for. Early seasons are seeded by the operator, which is stated openly rather than dressed up as fee revenue. |
| Price data | Scores depend on token prices from onchain pools. Thin or stale pricing can misvalue an open position. Affected rows are flagged. |
| Chain size | Robinhood Chain is young. On a quiet week there may be very few entrants and a league with six people in it is not much of a league. |
| Regulatory | A prize competition with a published winner sits in different legal positions in different countries. Rules may have to change, including excluding some jurisdictions. |
Deliberately not on this list: governance, staking, a second token, and anything that makes the mechanism harder to explain than it is on the front page.