🎮 T5MARKET Games Prop Desk Log in · Register

Prop-trading competitions

A competition is a free-to-enter, skill-ranked paper-trading contest on the desk. Every entrant receives a simulated account with the same virtual starting balance, trades the same session menus during the same window, and the leaderboard ranks the net result of those decisions. The prize pool is put up by the sponsor and split by final rank. Nothing an entrant pays ever goes into the pool, and nothing on a competition account is money.

This page explains how a competition works on the platform and, in the second half, the legal framework the mechanism is built to satisfy and what the operator must still do before launching one. It is an engineering summary, not legal advice: have counsel review the Official Rules and the eligibility list for every jurisdiction you open a competition to.

How it works

  1. The sponsor creates a competition with the CLI: slug, name, trading window, prize pool and split, virtual starting balance, optionally the markets it covers and a cap on entries. It can be created as a draft and published later.

    xgames competition create autumn-open --name "Autumn Open" \
  --starts 2026-10-01T00:00:00Z --ends 2026-10-31T23:59:59Z \
  --prize-pool 1500 --split 50,30,20 --virtual-balance 100000

  2. An account holder enters on https://t5market.com/competitions/<slug>: leaderboard name, country or region of residence, and three confirmations (of age, not affiliated with the sponsor, Official Rules accepted). Entry is free and needs no card, no balance and no participation fee. One entry per holder; excluded regions are refused.

  3. Entering opens a simulated account (Account.kind = competition) with the virtual balance and a cart bound to that account. The account cannot be topped up, charged, paid out, or funded by card or crypto, and it pays no participation fee. Orders on it are accepted only during the trading window and only on the competition's markets.
  4. Trading is the ordinary desk: pick deals on the market boards after switching the cart to the competition cart (a selector on the cart page or the competition page), then Place orders from the simulated balance. Positions fill, sell through and settle by the normal market rules. An agent can trade the entry too: register a key on the competition account from the console and use pay_from_balance=true.
  5. The leaderboard ranks active entries by score = balance − starting balance + paid orders not yet filled + cost basis and cash P&L to date of positions still open, i.e. the net P&L of the account; ties go to the earlier entry. It updates as sessions close and is public (leaderboard names only).
  6. Finalisation happens automatically once the window has ended and the last competition position has settled (or with xgames competition finalize <slug> --force). Prizes are allocated by rank and split and marked pending verification.
  7. Verification and payment are done by the sponsor outside the platform: identity, age, residence, and the tax form above the threshold. xgames competition prize <slug> --rank 1 --status paid records the outcome; forfeited passes nothing automatically — re-run the split by hand if a prize moves down the ranking.

API: GET /api/v1/competitions, GET /api/v1/competitions/{slug} (leaderboard), the competitions block of the manifest. Settings: XGM_COMPETITIONS, XGM_COMPETITION_SPONSOR, XGM_COMPETITION_EXCLUDED_REGIONS, XGM_COMPETITION_TAX_FORM_THRESHOLD.

The mechanism is designed so that a competition is a promotional contest of skill with no consideration, run on a simulator with no real instruments. Each design choice below maps to a rule.

1. Lottery / gambling: remove consideration, keep skill

Across US states, a promotion is an illegal lottery (or gambling) when three elements meet: a prize, chance, and consideration — a payment or something of value given to enter. Removing any one element takes the promotion out of the definition. Sweepstakes remove consideration ("no purchase necessary"); contests remove chance by awarding the prize on skill. Some states forbid consideration even in skill contests (Colorado, Maryland, Nebraska, North Dakota, Vermont are regularly cited; Arizona, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Louisiana, Montana, Tennessee and others restrict paid-entry skill games in practice), and where a paid contest is allowed, the prize may not consist solely of the entry fees.

The platform therefore removes both elements it can control:

  • No consideration. Entry is free; no card, balance or purchase is needed; the monthly participation fee for live trading is not required to enter and confers no advantage (the entry form and the Official Rules say so). No entrant money is pooled: funded_by = sponsor, and the prize pool is a fixed amount stated up front.
  • Skill, not chance. The ranking is the realised P&L of the entrant's own deal selection and position sizing on the recorded market; no draw, no random tiebreak (ties go to the earlier entry), and every entrant faces identical menus and terms. The UK's test is the strictest commonly cited one — a prize competition must require skill or judgment that can be expected to prevent a significant proportion of entrants from winning — and a leaderboard of trading results across many sessions is a skill-dominant outcome under the "dominant factor" test most US states apply as well.

Because entry is free, US state sweepstakes registration and bonding (Florida and New York above 5,000 USD in total prizes, Rhode Island for retail promotions) is not triggered as a matter of course — those regimes apply to chance-based games of promotion — but a free skill contest with a large pool should still be checked against them by counsel, and New York's winners-list practice is mirrored by the platform publishing the final standings for 90 days.

2. Financial regulation: nothing real is traded and nothing is funded

Regulators have been closing in on "prop firm" evaluation programmes, where a trader pays a fee to trade a simulated account and is promised a share of profits on a "funded" account afterwards: the CFTC's case against My Forex Funds and its 2024–2025 statements put fee-for-evaluation, profit-share models within reach of commodity-trading-advisor and anti-fraud rules when real customer money or commodity interests are involved, and firms have moved to simulated-account structures and pay from their own funds partly for that reason.

The competition here is deliberately not that model:

  • the items traded are virtual in-game goods of the T5MARKET Games Market, not securities, futures, forex, crypto-assets or any commodity interest, so securities and derivatives regimes (SEC/CFTC, MiFID, FCA) are not engaged by the trading itself;
  • no entrant pays to be evaluated, and no "funded account" or profit share follows — the only thing at stake is a fixed, sponsor-funded prize;
  • the simulated balance is explicitly not money: it cannot be deposited, withdrawn or paid out, and the ledger marks it virtual_credit;
  • results on a simulated account are stated not to predict real results, and the platform gives no investment advice.

If a future competition were to award live trading balance instead of cash, or to charge entry, this analysis changes: an entry fee reintroduces consideration (illegal lottery risk in the states above and a paid-entry skill game elsewhere) and a funded-account prize brings the arrangement closer to the evaluation-programme model under scrutiny.

3. Promotion law: Official Rules, disclosures, eligibility

US federal and state law (and the FTC's deception standard) require a promotion to disclose its material terms in Official Rules: sponsor, eligibility, dates, how to enter, how winners are determined, prizes and their value, odds or the statement that the contest is one of skill, "no purchase necessary", "void where prohibited", and how the winners list can be obtained. The platform renders the Official Rules per competition from the sponsor settings and the competition fields, and the entry form requires their acceptance with a version stamp.

Eligibility controls in code: adults only (self-declared, verified before payment), one entry per account holder, self-declared region checked against XGM_COMPETITION_EXCLUDED_REGIONS, employees and affiliates excluded by declaration, disqualification for multiple accounts, collusion or exploiting defects.

4. Taxes: prizes are income

Prizes are taxable income to the winner. In the United States the sponsor must collect Form W-9 and file Form 1099-MISC when prizes to one person in a year reach the reporting threshold — 2,000 USD from tax year 2026 under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (600 USD before), indexed from 2027. The platform keeps prizes pending verification until the sponsor has the form, and XGM_COMPETITION_TAX_FORM_THRESHOLD sets the amount from which one is requested. Other jurisdictions have their own rules; the Official Rules put all prize taxes on the winner.

5. Consumer and data protection

The entry form collects a leaderboard name and a region; the leaderboard shows names and scores only. The privacy policy covers the processing; the terms and conditions apply to the platform use around the contest.

Before launching a competition — checklist for the operator

  • Put the sponsor's legal name and address in XGM_COMPETITION_SPONSOR; the Official Rules print it.
  • Decide the excluded regions with counsel and set XGM_COMPETITION_EXCLUDED_REGIONS (residents are refused at entry).
  • Have counsel review the rendered Official Rules for the jurisdictions you open to; add local clauses (governing law, alternative dispute resolution, Québec, EU consumer rules) as needed.
  • Keep entry free and the prize pool sponsor-funded; do not tie entry to the participation fee, a purchase or a balance.
  • For large pools, check FL/NY/RI registration positions even though the contest is skill-based and free, and keep the winners list published.
  • Prepare the verification step (identity, age, residence, W-9 or local equivalent) and pay prizes only after it; record the outcome with xgames competition prize.
  • Keep the platform's disclosures that simulated results are not real results and that nothing is investment advice.

Sources consulted (September 2026)