The venue really does pay out, and not a small amount. But "money exists" and "you can get it" are different claims — it is split by score, so more participants means less each, and it is concentrated in places you may not be trading.
| Item | Measured |
|---|---|
| Boards carrying a live daily rate | 8,631 |
| Nominal pool | about $172,177 / day |
| Actually reaching the "small player" tier | about $77,000 / day |
| Wallets in that tier | about 5,500 |
| Of those, collecting on three consecutive days | about 3,800 |
That tier earns roughly $2 to $150 a day. Spread $77,000 over 5,500 wallets and the mean is about $14/day — but the distribution is severely right-skewed, so the median is far below the mean.
$172,177/day is the sum of every board's daily rate — a nominal ceiling. A board only pays its pool out if someone posts quotes of sufficient quality; where quoting is thin, that money does not materialise from nowhere.
So do not size your share off the nominal pool. Read actual on-chain payouts — they are batched transfers at a fixed daily time, fully enumerable.
| Item | Detail |
|---|---|
| Frequency | daily |
| Time | about 00:45 UTC |
| Form | batched transfers, roughly 400 per batch |
| Verifiability | fully on-chain — anyone can enumerate it |
The last row is the valuable property: reward distribution is completely public. You need not trust anyone's claims — count it yourself: who received, how much, how many days running. That is exactly what my census did, enumerating recipients for three consecutive days.
① Most public nodes will not serve you. Pulling chain logs in bulk gets refused by most free providers, and the one that worked imposed hard limits (address filter required, a few dozen blocks per call). See eight API traps.
② One address contaminates the statistics. It receives $600k–920k per day inside the batches while having no corresponding trading record on the leaderboard. Any per-capita, median or distribution figure must exclude it. (I only note that it distorts the basis — no identity attribution is made.)
The decision-relevant part: rewards are not spread evenly across categories.
Checking live crypto up/down boards one by one: 1h and 15m return empty, 5m returns only a placeholder config (daily rate 0.001). So market making up/down earns essentially none of this — that lane's only subsidy is the fill-triggered maker rebate.
And not with the most convenient field: an empty clobRewards array
does not imply no pool. The authoritative source is the CLOB sampling-markets endpoint.
Likewise metadata fields like minimum size and maximum spread exist as part of a config template — their presence does not mean money is paid.
Rewards score quote quality, and the formula specifically pays for tightness: closer to mid scores higher, with quadratic decay, and zero beyond the board's maximum spread.
So it is not free money — scoring forces you tight, and tight gets swept. Measured cost of stepping back:
| Quoting at | Reward | Fills | Bad-fill $ |
|---|---|---|---|
| join best | ×1 | ×1 | ×1 |
| −1¢ | ×0.59 | ×0.33 | ×0.53 |
| −2¢ | ×0.26 | ×0.16 | ×0.29 |
Detail in LP rewards.
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| Can this pool support a person? | depends on your share, not the pool total |
| How do I estimate my share? | find wallets running your approach and read what they received on-chain |
| What is the ceiling here? | see the real ceiling on each path |
| Will the subsidy persist? | No guarantee. Rates, splits and categories all change |
Row two is the practical one: do not estimate — count. On-chain distribution is public; find a few wallets of the same shape and read their actual receipts. That beats any model.
Something like $170k of nominal pool exists daily, but it is split by score, unevenly distributed, and outright zero in some categories. The only reliable way to know whether you can reach it is to count what comparable wallets actually received on-chain — which requires trusting nobody.