The odd one out among the four: no fill required — resting size scores. Two things to establish first though: not every board has it, and the scoring formula specifically pays for tightness. "Quote deeper, stay safe, still collect" is structurally impossible.
| Maker rebate | LP rewards | |
|---|---|---|
| Trigger | must be filled | pays unfilled |
| You want | tight quotes, get hit | qualifying quotes, ideally not hit |
| Main risk | adverse selection | bad fills when swept |
| Available | any board with a taker fee | only boards in the programme |
Both pay posters, with exactly opposite triggers. That is why "market making" is two businesses here — and why lifting someone's approach so often fails: they are collecting this one while you assume you are collecting the other.
| Property | Consequence |
|---|---|
s measures distance from mid | not queue level. Closer to mid scores higher |
| The bracket is squared | decay is fast — stepping back costs more than you would guess |
Beyond v it is zero | quote too wide and you get nothing, not less |
It appears in a lot of guides and it contradicts the formula directly: the programme is built to buy tight quotes.
I ran a full replay across every recorded reward board, comparing quoting at the best price against stepping back one and two cents:
| Quoting at | Reward | Fill count | Bad-fill $ |
|---|---|---|---|
| join best | ×1 | ×1 | ×1 |
| −1¢ | ×0.59 | ×0.33 | ×0.53 |
| −2¢ | ×0.26 | ×0.16 | ×0.29 |
Two cents back leaves a quarter of the reward. "Safer" is real (bad fills fall to 0.29) but it is not free — you are paying three-quarters of the reward for it.
clobRewards: [] does not mean no rewards
An empty array from the events endpoint does not imply "no pool".
The authoritative source is the CLOB's sampling-markets endpoint —
pulling it in full returned 8,631 boards carrying a real daily rate,
with a nominal pool of about $172,177/day. Not remotely the same set as filtering on
clobRewards.
Same family: a board's metadata carries fields like minimum size for rewards and maximum spread. Their presence does not mean money is paid — they are part of a config template. More of the family in eight API traps.
| Tenor | What the rewards endpoint returns |
|---|---|
| 1 hour / 15 minutes | empty |
| 5 minutes | a placeholder config (daily rate 0.001) |
So market making up/down earns essentially none of this subsidy; that lane's only subsidy is the fill-triggered one. Anyone telling you "up/down market making has LP rewards" has conflated the two.
| Item | Detail |
|---|---|
| Frequency | daily |
| Time | about 00:45 UTC |
| Form | batched transfers, roughly 400 per batch |
| Recorded in | ⚠ not trading P&L — it is a transfer, not a trade |
That last row makes you wrong in both directions: underrating players who live on this
(their leaderboard number can look poor or negative) and overrating your own strategy
if you counted subsidies as strategy income. Real net income is
trading P&L + total received, queried separately and summed.
I ran a line on weather doing nothing but collecting this subsidy. It is archived at about −$210. Rather than the playbook, here are the transferable conclusions:
| Lesson | Note |
|---|---|
| The pool is real | the money genuinely pays out daily, verifiable on-chain |
| You are not the only one quoting | it is split by score; more participants, less each |
| Bad fills are the main cost | scoring forces you tight, and tight gets swept |
| Subsidy removal is policy risk | rates, splits and eligible categories can change — and then it is negative |
The last one deserves a thought: a strategy that is 100% dependent on a subsidy does not live or die by your judgement — it lives or dies by a product decision. Size it as though the subsidy could be zero tomorrow.
This one does not require a fill, but it does require tightness — and tight quotes get swept. So it is not free money; it is money bought with sweep risk. The only way to know whether that trade is good is to net the bad fills against it.
S = ((v−s)/v)² × b, s measured from mid, v the board's maximum spread;
quadratic decay, zero beyond v.