Operator economics

Your cut of every evaluation

Your share of each evaluation fee is fixed by your tier:

Those are your baseline rates, and they're also your floor, not your ceiling. As your firm's treasury crosses tier-scaled SOL thresholds, your effective share of each new fee climbs automatically, up to 13.6%–20% by tier at the top zone. Nothing to configure or apply for; How the treasury health split works has the full ladder.

Half of that pays out immediately. The other half is held for 90 days and then becomes claimable, and because the hold is per sale rather than one schedule, sales you make today keep maturing behind you as you keep selling. If your firm is ever wound down through bankruptcy (see Operator risk & lifecycle), anything still inside its 90 days is clawed back rather than paid out, and anything already matured stays yours regardless.

This is fee income specifically. It's separate from, and smaller than, your real upside: you own your firm's treasury and its token supply outright, and both compound as your firm sells more evaluations and grows.

You also get paid when your traders do

A funded payout spends your treasury and pays you at the same time. Every payout your firm settles from its own treasury distributes a stakeholder share alongside the trader's cut, and 30% of that share is yours, delivered in $FIRMA$FIRMAA firm's own fixed-supply token, minted at launch. Used to fund and deliver payouts via the firm's bonding curve.. On a trader's $10,000 profit at an 80/20 split, that's $600 to you. The same transaction buys your token on your own curve and burns a slice of supply, so the payout you funded is also demand for the equity you hold. The conflict of interest, removed has the full six-way split, what you can adjust within it, and the cases where it pays you nothing.

The one dial you actually turn

At launch you make exactly one economic choice, a profitability presetProfitability presetThe one economic dial a firm sets at launch: a tradeoff between trader split and evaluation pricing (Max Profit, Balanced, or Most Conservative). Everything past this one choice is managed automatically by the risk engine., and the risk engine manages everything downstream of it automatically:

There's no wrong answer here, it's a genuine tradeoff between margin and volume, not a setting with a hidden correct value. Most firms run Balanced.

Pricing and split also drift on their own as you grow

Separate from that one choice, and separate from risk health entirely, your evaluation pricing and trader split shift automatically as your firm's real reserves grow, an introductory price and your most generous split at launch, rising toward a higher price and a smaller (though still substantial) split as reserves cross real thresholds. If your firm's payout flow ever stalls, this drops back a phase automatically, cheaper pricing, a better split, until you've earned your way back. You don't manage this; it's the same mechanism covered in more depth in How the risk engine thinks.

Your treasury is working capital, not a savings account

Every evaluation fee that isn't earmarked elsewhere lands in your firm's own treasury, roughly half of every eval fee, after the fixed platform legs (insurance, staking, buybacks, the universal pool) and your own owner share are carved out. That treasury is what funds most trader payouts directly (see Funded accounts & payouts), and it's also the metric that gates which account sizes you're allowed to sell (see Evaluations & the rulebook). A bigger treasury isn't just a bigger number on a dashboard, it's what unlocks $100k, $200k, and eventually $1M evaluations.

Watching your numbers

Your firm's liquidity has four layers: your treasury, your token reserve, your backstop pool (if you have stakers), and your share of the Universal Treasury PoolUniversal Treasury PoolA cross-firm shared liquidity pool, funded by a slice of every firm's fees, used only as the last layer of the payout waterfall.. Your operator dashboard shows all four together, since that combined figure, not treasury alone, is what actually determines your account-size ladder and your firm's risk tierRisk tierA firm's current health classification under the ARE: Trusted, Standard, Strained, or Critical. Only ever tightens what new evaluations and payouts look like going forward, never retroactively.. Growth here comes from one thing: selling evaluations. There's no separate lever to inflate it artificially, and there shouldn't be, it's meant to be an honest reflection of how much real trading activity your firm has done.

What you don't have to fund yourself

Two things that sound like operator costs aren't, in practice:

• The security bond. Every firm posts a 50 SOL fraud-deterrent bond, but it fills itself automatically from a 1% slice of your own eval-fee revenue over time. You never write a check for it.
• Trader payouts beyond your treasury. If a payout exceeds what your treasury and reserve can cover, backstop stakingBackstop stakingCapital voluntarily staked by outside investors as a firm's payout collateral, in exchange for yield. Drawn on only after a firm's own treasury and token reserve are exhausted. and the Universal Treasury Pool absorb it, not you personally. See Tokenomics & liquidity.

Next: Growing your firm covers pricing, affiliates, and marketing tools; Operator risk & lifecycle covers what happens under stress.