The pool and the payout queue
What you trade against, where its money comes from, and what happens when it cannot pay a winner straight away.
This is Papertrade's Martingaler pool and payout queue. The token differs from Papertrade's: TRADEhasafixedsupplyandateamandPAPER − holderallocation(see[TRADE](#trade)).
The pool
The pool is the USDC the house holds to settle trades. It starts at $0. There is no seed capital, no founder deposit and no way for anyone to deposit into it. It grows only from traders' losses.
Every trade faces the pool. A trader's win is paid from it; a trader's loss goes into it.
The payout queue
When the pool cannot pay a winning close in full, the unpaid part of the win goes into a first-in, first-out queue. As later losses refill the pool, the front of the queue is paid first.
- Margin is never queued. When you close a position opened from your available balance, your margin comes back to your balance immediately. Only profit can be queued.
- A queued payout is real on-chain debt, not a refund or a haircut. It is a delay.
- Positions can be opened using queued balance as margin. If such a position is closed, the surviving claim can be queued again. If it is liquidated, the claim is destroyed.
- While the queue is active, losses are held in a side bucket earmarked for queued winners rather than becoming free pool cash, and the 2% loss-side fee is waived.
- Harvesting (paying the front of the queue) is a public function anyone can call; the foundation's keeper calls it routinely.
Three accounting buckets
| Bucket | What it is |
|---|---|
| Pool cash | Everything the exchange holds, minus users' available balances, margin in open positions and accrued fees. Cannot go negative. |
| Side bucket | Loss proceeds earmarked for queued winners while the queue is non-empty. Drained first by harvest. |
| Payout queue | FIFO list of unpaid winning closes, each an (account, amount) pair. |
Tracked pool is the running total of the pool's profit and loss. Unlike pool cash it can go negative, which is what "underwater" means. The staker share of pool gains reads pool equity (see Staking).
What this means for traders, plainly
- When the pool is healthy, winners are paid at once.
- When the pool is low or underwater, winners wait in line.
- In the first year, losers earn $TRADE; the earliest periods pay the most.
- The design cannot go bankrupt, because it never pays more than it holds. It can stall: if the queue grows faster than losses refill it, winners wait longer and longer. If they stop believing they will be paid, deposits stop and the queue never clears. That is the real failure mode.