Yes. Playing, ranking and winning prizes is free — no deposit, no card, no purchase necessary. The optional Boost Pass (from €9 a month) only adds features such as leverage and priority sprints; it never changes your prize odds and is never required to win.

Our practice season. Until Monday 4 January 2027 every prize on the site is a practice prize: you rank, earn badges and see exactly what Season 1 will pay, but no money is paid out. On that Monday Season 1 starts with real payouts and a launch pot of at least €500 guaranteed by EdgeArena, plus 40% of the net price of every pass sold in Season 0. If the date moves, active pass months until the new date are refunded or extended for free.

Two ways. Path 1: our ranking model — a published formula, no black box — scores your paper-trading edge; if you rank, the Arena Pool — our own trading account — mirrors your strategy and you keep a share of the profits. Path 2: every week the best leaderboard performance wins a cash prize outright.

Consistency over luck. The edge score is a fixed, published formula: profit factor (30%), drawdown control (25%), expectancy per trade (20%), win rate (15%) and consistency (10%), damped until you have 30 closed trades. No artificial intelligence, no black box — the same numbers you see on your dashboard. A big lucky trade won't rank you; a repeatable process will.

25 markets across crypto, forex, indices, commodities and popular stocks — with more added regularly. Each market also has its own leverage ceiling, like at a real broker: forex up to 50x, BTC/ETH, indices, gold and silver 20x, other crypto, oil and gas 10x, stocks 5x. Your pass sets your personal cap; on each market the lower of the two applies — so Diamond (50x) reaches 50x on forex but 20x on BTC.

Every position closes automatically after 14 days (reason "auto-closed"); in the last 3 days you can extend it once by 7 days from the Positions tab. Resting limit orders expire after 7 days. To appear on a board you need real activity, not one lucky trade: the weekly board and its prizes need at least 3 closed trades on 2 different days that week, the monthly jackpot at least 9 closed trades on 5 different days that month. Divisions and the Team Cup keep their simple rule of 3 closed trades a week.

No. Your paper balance can go down, but it's not your money. The only thing you can ever pay is an optional monthly Boost Pass, which you can cancel at any time.

Weekly, by SEPA bank transfer after a short identity verification in your profile. During Season 0 (until Monday 4 January 2027) all prizes are practice prizes and nothing is paid out — the ladders show what Season 1 will pay. Season 0 weekly winners enter the Hall of Fame and receive the Founder badge plus one free month of Bronze.

No. Many of our top traders started from zero. Paper trading is the safest way to learn — and here it can actually pay.

An optional monthly pass (Bronze €9 · Silver €19 · Gold €49 · Platinum €99 · Diamond €199, VAT included). It unlocks leverage on the order ticket, priority access to 4h/24h sprints and the Founder badge; Gold, Platinum and Diamond (the Pro Trader line) add Pro analytics. It does NOT change your prize odds, is not an entry fee for any competition, and is not a deposit or an investment. Cancel any time; the pass stays active until the end of the paid month.

Pro analytics is the analysis layer of the Gold, Platinum and Diamond passes (the Pro Trader line). It breaks your own closed trades down by hour, weekday, direction, leverage, hold time, close reason, market and position size, shows a risk profile (stop-loss discipline, R multiples, streaks, drawdown, consistency), what-if scenarios ("your result without trades over 10x"), rule-based trade analysis sorted by impact, and a CSV export. Everyone can open the page and sees one insight and two breakdowns for free — the rest is blurred until you have a Pro Trader pass. It is computed from your simulated trades only, it is never investment advice, and it does not change your prize odds: Pro traders are ranked exactly like everyone else.

Passes are billed through Stripe with card, Bancontact, iDEAL or SEPA direct debit. Prizes are paid via SEPA to any EU bank account after identity verification — usually within days, not weeks. Everything is in EUR by default; switch to USD display in your profile.

Instead of one long world ranking you compete in a division of real members of your level (max. 50). Every Sunday the top 20% of ranked members promote (from 5 ranked members) and the bottom 20% relegate (from 10) — in a full division that is 10 up and 10 down. Every division has its own prizes from 5 ranked members, so progress is visible from week one.

Yes — all of them. Every name on the leaderboard, in your division, in a sprint or on the homepage is a registered member, and every return is the realised P/L of their paper account on our price feed. Many platforms pad empty boards with modelled or invented traders to suggest a crowd; we deliberately don't. With us an empty board is an empty board, and we say so. The only exceptions are clearly labelled schematics on the homepage (an 'example team' and 'what a full division looks like' with fictional names) and the example trader page — they explain the rules and count nowhere.

Create a team (3–5 members) and share the invite code or link. Every week there is a Team Cup: your team score is the average weekly return of your 3 best members, so a beginner never hurts the team. Teams with at least 3 members and 3 closed trades are ranked; the top 5 share the Team Cup pot. On Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday there is also a 24-hour team sprint on one market — teams only, automatic entry, top 3 paid. Team prizes come from their own share of the prize budget and are, like everything else, free to enter.

Every net euro (after VAT and payment fees) is split by a published formula: 40% tops up the prize pools, 35% builds the Arena Pool — EdgeArena's own trading account that will mirror the arena's best-ranked strategies once it is active — and 25% runs the platform. Half of every profitable pool week is added to the next week's prizes as a bonus; a losing week never reduces a published pool. Pass holders do not own a share of the account and the split is a voluntary, published top-up rule, not a claim.