Challenge & Funded Account Rules

Everything below describes what our matching, pricing and risk engines actually do — not marketing language. Where a number is engine configuration rather than something you choose, we say so and give the current value. Where a rule depends on the plan you bought (account size, drawdown %, profit target %, etc.), the specific figures for your challenge are fixed at purchase and shown on your challenge summary and dashboard; this page describes how each of those figures is used, not which one applies to you.

1. What You're Actually Trading

Every account on DeepFunded — evaluation or funded — is entirely simulated. No order you place is ever routed to a real exchange, no position ever holds real cryptocurrency, and no capital, yours or ours, is ever placed at real market risk. Prices are real: we stream live prices from real exchanges, but your fills are generated internally against our own pricing and matching engine (see §9), never sent anywhere.

If you pass an evaluation and are funded, and you later request a payout, that payout is a contractual cash reward we pay you for meeting the performance rules on a simulated account. It is not a share of real trading profits, an investment return, interest, or a securities or investment product of any kind, and DeepFunded is not acting as your broker, investment adviser, or asset manager at any point.

2. Challenge Structure: Phases and Passing

You buy either a One-Step challenge (one evaluation phase, then funded) or a Two-Step challenge (two evaluation phases in sequence, then funded), at an account size of $25,000, $50,000, $100,000, $150,000 or $200,000.

An evaluation phase completes only when all of the following are true at the same instant:

• Your equity has reached the phase's profit target (§3);
• You've had enough qualifying profitable trading days (§6);
• Your consistency ratio, if your plan has one, is within its limit (§7); and
• You are flat — no open positions on any symbol.

The flat requirement exists because completing a phase re-anchors your account (below); that can't be done coherently while a position is still open and moving your equity. If your equity touches the target while you're still in a trade, the phase simply doesn't complete yet — close out, and it is re-checked on your account's next price update.

A challenge is never "passed" in a way that ends it. Clearing your last evaluation phase moves you into the funded phase, which stays live — trading against the same drawdown and daily-loss rules — until it eventually breaches (§13). There is no separate manual review step in the ordinary course: phase completion and breach detection are both automatic.

3. Profit Target

Your target is a fixed percentage of your phase's starting balance, set at purchase:

The target is measured against equity (balance plus unrealised profit/loss on open positions), not closed balance — so an open winning position counts toward it. Equity exactly at the target satisfies it. A funded account has no profit target at all; it runs on the ongoing rules only (§13).

4. Maximum Drawdown (Trailing)

Your maximum-drawdown percentage is fixed at purchase. It defines a floor that trails your account's peak closed balance upward — never your peak equity — and locks once that trailing calculation reaches your original starting balance:

Example — $50,000 account, 10% drawdown: your floor starts at $45,000. Once you've banked (realised) $4,000 of profit, your peak closed balance is $54,000 and the floor trails up to $49,000. Once your peak closed balance reaches $55,000, the floor's calculation reaches exactly $50,000 — your original starting balance — and locks there for the rest of the phase, no matter how much higher your peak climbs afterward.

A breach requires your equity to sit below the floor for 3 consecutive price updates on a symbol you hold — evaluation happens every time the price of an instrument you're positioned in moves, not on a timer. A single wick that dips below the floor and recovers within those 3 updates does not end your challenge.

5. Daily Loss Limit

If your plan includes a daily loss limit (percentage fixed at purchase; some plans are sold with "No Daily Limit," in which case this rule never fires), it resets every day at 00:00 UTC, anchored to your account's equity at that moment:

The dollar allowance is a fixed percentage of your original starting balance, not of the day's opening equity — so a losing day doesn't shrink tomorrow's allowance and a winning day doesn't widen it. Like Max Drawdown, the breach check is on live equity and requires 3 consecutive violating price updates before it fires. If you're flat with no position open at exactly 00:00 UTC, your day-open equity is captured at the next price update that evaluates your account, not necessarily at the stroke of midnight.

6. Minimum Profitable Trading Days

A UTC calendar day counts as a "profitable day" if your net realised PnL for that day (after commission) is both positive and at least 0.1% of your phase's starting balance. Unrealised profit sitting in an open position does not count, on that day or any other, until it is actually closed — this is what stops the gate being farmed with a string of one-cent scalps or a single winner carried across midnight and counted twice.

Realised PnL is attributed to the UTC day the closing fill actually happened on. Qualifying days do not need to be consecutive; any day that clears the threshold counts toward your plan's required total (fixed at purchase).

7. Consistency Rule

Your consistency ratio is your single best UTC day's net realised profit, divided by your total net realised profit for the phase:

Losing days are included in the total and can only push the ratio in your favour (a bigger denominator), never against you. To satisfy the gate, your ratio must be at or below your plan's consistency limit.

If your total net realised profit is zero or negative, the ratio is undefined and the gate is treated as unmet, not as automatically satisfied.

8. Instruments, Leverage & Positions

Actively tradable instruments, all quoted in simulated USD pairs:

Leverage is chosen on each order, not set by the instrument — every order picks a leverage from the published steps 5x, 10x, 25x, 50x or 100x. An order that omits leverage defaults to 5x; an order that specifies a value outside those five steps is rejected outright, not rounded to the nearest one. Leverage only sets the margin a position reserves — notional ÷ leverage — and therefore where its stop-out sits; it does not decide how much total exposure your account may carry.

Positions are spot-style

• One open position per instrument per account. You cannot average into or scale an existing position — an order to open a symbol you already hold a position in is rejected; close it first.
• There are no perpetual contracts and no funding rates. A position costs nothing to simply hold, for any length of time — the only costs are commission and slippage on entry and exit (§9).

Account-wide notional cap

Every open position draws on one shared limit, not a per-instrument one: total open notional across all your positions, regardless of the leverage each was opened at, cannot exceed your account equity × 4 — an order that would push the account over that cap is rejected outright, with no partial fill. This is on top of, not instead of, the ordinary margin check: every new position must also fit within your account's free equity once the required margin (notional ÷ leverage) for every open position is added up.

A limit or stop order that is resting is re-validated against both the leverage step and the notional cap again at the moment it triggers, using equity as of that moment — so an order that was acceptable when placed can still be rejected at trigger if your equity has since fallen or other positions have since been opened. See §10 for how a resting order otherwise behaves, including across an instrument halt.

9. Pricing, Spreads, Slippage & Commission

The price for each instrument is the median of live prices from four independent exchange venues (Coinbase, Kraken, Bybit, OKX) — never a single exchange's number. Before the median is taken:

• any venue that hasn't produced a fresh price in the last 10 seconds is dropped entirely;
• of what's left, any venue whose price sits more than 2% away from the group's median is treated as an outlier and dropped, and the median is recomputed from the rest (if dropping outliers would leave nothing, nothing is dropped — a genuinely wide, real market move is never mistaken for a bad feed).

Our spread is then applied symmetrically around that median (you buy at the ask, sell at the bid):

Slippage is a further fixed adjustment applied to every fill — opening or closing — always against you (buys fill higher, sells fill lower), by the exact percentage above, except where the limit-price guarantee below caps it. It is deterministic, not random: the same market conditions always produce the same fill.

Commission is 0.04% of a position's notional value, charged on both the opening and the closing fill — a full round trip costs 0.08% of notional in commission, before spread or slippage.

Market orders fill immediately at the current ask (buy) or bid (sell), moved by slippage as above. A limit order fills at your limit price or better, never worse — slippage is applied and then capped at the limit, so the worst you ever pay is the price you set. A stop order is a request to trade at market once your trigger price trades, so once triggered it fills exactly like a market order, slippage included.

10. Trading Halts

An instrument halts — no order can fill, and none can be newly submitted for it — when either:

• fewer than 3 of the 4 exchange venues have a live, fresh, non-outlier price for it. A shortfall must persist for a full 2 seconds before the halt actually takes effect, so one venue missing a single update doesn't flap the instrument on and off; or
• an independent reference feed (Pyth Network) is itself fresh and its own confidence interval exceeds 0.5% of the price — used purely as a sanity check against our own composite, so a stale reference feed never causes a halt by itself.

Resuming is immediate — the moment conditions clear, trading resumes with no debounce delay. While an instrument is halted, any new order for it — market, limit or stop — is rejected. An order you already had resting from before the halt is not cancelled; it simply does not evaluate against the market until the instrument resumes, then evaluates normally.

11. How Halts Interact With Rule Breaches

As a result, the equity figure recorded at the moment your breach fired and your account's final realised balance once every position is actually closed out can differ. This is a deliberate design choice: waiting for every halted position to become closeable before declaring a breach would let a trader ride out a losing position behind a feed outage — precisely the outcome server-side risk enforcement exists to prevent.

12. Stop-Outs (Margin Calls)

Separately from the rule breaches above, a mechanical margin safeguard applies to every account at all times: if your equity falls to 50% or less of the total margin reserved across all your open positions, your worst-unrealised-PnL position is force-closed. The check repeats after every close, continuing to close your worst-losing position until your margin level recovers above 50% or nothing closeable remains (a position on a currently halted symbol cannot be force-closed until it resumes).

A stop-out is not itself a challenge rule and does not by itself end your challenge — but the loss it locks in changes your balance and equity, and can go on to trigger a Max Drawdown or Daily Loss breach on the same tick or shortly after.

13. Funded Stage, Profit Split & Payouts

The funded phase carries forward the same Max Drawdown and Daily Loss rules as your evaluation, at the same percentages. It has no profit target and no minimum trading-day requirement — it simply runs, under the two ongoing rules above, until it eventually breaches.

Your profit split — the share of funded-phase profit paid to you as a payout — is fixed at purchase (70–90%, depending on plan). Payouts are the contractual cash rewards described in §1, paid for meeting the performance rules on a simulated account.

13.1 What you can withdraw

A payout is available on a funded account only, never during an evaluation phase. Your withdrawable amount is:

"Net realised profit" is closed profit and loss after commission, exactly as recorded in your account ledger — unrealised profit on an open position is not withdrawable, however large. The window runs from whichever is later: the moment you became funded, or your last paid payout. A request you cancelled, or one we rejected, does not close the window; nothing you earned is lost by asking.

13.2 Per-payout cap

A single payout is capped, and the cap depends on your account size. If your profit would produce more than the cap, you are paid the cap and the remaining profit stays in your account for your next payout — it is not forfeited, and it continues to trade as part of your balance.

13.3 The consistency rule applies to payouts

Your plan's consistency limit (§7) — the same percentage you purchased, not a different one — is checked again when you request a payout, measured over your realised profit since your last payout. If one UTC day accounts for more of that profit than your limit allows, the payout is held until further profitable days dilute the ratio.

13.4 Requesting and receiving

Your account must be flat (no open positions) to request a payout: paying you re-anchors your balance, which cannot be done coherently while margin is committed. There is a minimum payout amount, below which a request is declined — a transfer has a fixed cost to make.

You may have one open payout request at a time. Requesting again while one is outstanding returns the request you already have; it never creates a second one.

Payouts are reviewed and paid manually by bank transfer. There is no instant or automated withdrawal. The amount is calculated by the engine when you request it and is frozen at that moment — it does not change while your request is being reviewed, whatever your account does in the meantime.

When a payout is paid, your account is debited for the profit it drew on — your share to you, ours retained — and your drawdown high-water mark and daily-loss window re-anchor to your new balance. Your account size, and therefore every threshold percentage, is unchanged. Being paid never puts you closer to a breach than you were before.

14. Enforcement & Versioning

Every rule above is enforced automatically by our risk engine against live account equity — there is no discretionary manual override in the ordinary course, and a breach, once fired, is final. This document may be revised from time to time; the version in force for any given challenge is the one you accepted at checkout, cryptographically recorded as described at the top of this page.

15. Legal Entity

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