Rules

No sharing of solutions, hints, publicly or privately with other participants

No creation of public repositories, gists, Dune queries, or other publicly accessible resources containing solutions

No attacking the Challenge infrastructure

No multi-accounting

Treat others with respect, without foul language, hate speech, discrimination, racism, or any other type of anti-social behavior

The Challenge duration is expected to last 2 weeks (Start: Aug 20, 2025, 3:00 PM UTC, End: Sep 3, 2025, 3:00 PM UTC)

Before starting the Challenge, participants should register the wallet they will use

The Challenge consists of two formats based on real events: 8 case studies and 1 one-week onchain PvP competition

Case studies will be available for the 2-week duration of the Challenge, but it may be beneficial to finish them before the start of the PvP competition

The PvP competition should go live around 3:00 PM UTC, August 27th, 2025, with more information available closer to the date

For improving the PvP competition experience, participants should have 100+ score before the start to join it, or 400+ score after the start

Participants can access the Challenge Telegram chat after providing Telegram handles in the profile and sending a join request

The Telegram chat will be used for various organizational updates, questions, etc.

First three case studies are open-ended questions, where we expect no more than 4.5k symbols (with the usage of Markdown if necessary) to keep the reviewing process quick

Please replicate the same structure for solutions, as we used for questions, to avoid being penalized for making the review more difficult

Only one submission per open-ended case study is allowed

Submit your solutions for open-ended cases in English, otherwise they will not be reviewed

Other case studies include interactions from the registered wallet (funded with ETH and tokens for all tasks) with an RPC, where we expect a certain state transition

If the expected state was achieved, participants will receive the full score for the task

If a participant believes that they broke the state of the provided environment, they can reset it to its initial state

There is an option to enable Tenderly explorer for specific RPC (available through its URL), by doing this, their maximum score will be limited to 75% of marks available

In the case of giving up on the automated RPC verification, participants can provide their best solution as a link to a private gist for manual review, by doing this, their maximum score will be limited to half of the maximum marks available

Only one gist submission per coding case study is permitted

Only the first gist revision will be checked, and the solution should be provided in the format of a Solidity contract (ideally a Foundry script/test) with all important ABI interfaces and comments if needed

We distribute 2.5 ETH (purely for gas, but for fairness, don't add more ETH to the address) and 200,000 acUSDT to your registered wallet on Sepolia if you're qualified according to the rules. Please ping us in the Telegram chat if you achieved 400+ score after the start of PvP

Accounts with no activity at the end of the competition will be disqualified - it's not a "hold and forget" game

Wash traders only interact with acUSD-acALPHA Uni v3 pairs

As in real-life, theoretically anything can happen, so no matter what your strategy is, there may be factors that increase volatility

We ask all participants to manage funds from their registered wallets, instead of utilizing smart contracts, to avoid miscalculations. For example, it's important to provide liquidity through the NonfungiblePositionManager, otherwise, your net liquidity will be updated only after the position is closed

In the case of the smart contract usage for strategies, we will not do any net liquidity calculation changes to account for it at the end of PvP. It's on players to ensure that their final net liquidity is correct

Transferring game tokens between registered wallets is prohibited. Any attempts to do this will cause the sender's disqualification, and the receiver will also be disqualified if they use funds in the game instead of burning them

The method of token transfer between players doesn't matter, whether it's a direct transfer, a fake swap in a specifically created pool, or something else. We'll investigate all suspicious cases, and we're keen to look at tips

Any collusion is also prohibited, because tit moves us further away from the real-world scenario, where it's usually pure PvP most of the time and hard to figure out who controls a certain address and colludes with the owner

Similar to real-life, it could be worth searching onchain (within the game universe) for hidden long-tail opportunities that will give you reasonable amount of acUSDT. At least one will be deployed each day at random time and available on a FCFS basis

On top of the net liquidity increase, the taker also gets the PvP progression badge for recognition

The following day, the hint will be available as the name of its FCFS badge if nobody claims it

It's not prohibited to deploy traps or honeypots since other people will likely be searching for FCFS opportunities. However these traps must only include tokens from the game universe, and must not open access to the competition to anyone else

Participants can freely use any part of the Sepolia infrastructure in their solutions, if it's not against other rules, feel free to show your skills and creativity

The score for each case study varies based on its tier, and there are no bonus points for solving earlier (that's a good way to show up on our radar, though)

Tier 1, Tier 2, and Tier 3 questions are worth 75, 100, and 150 points, respectively

All open-ended questions are Tier 1, except the 'Rabbithole' which is Tier 2

The first two coding case studies are Tier 2, and the last ones are Tier 3

There is a leaderboard with daily updates for manual reviews (9pm UTC) based on the performance of each participant

The PvP score will be linked to the net liquidity and will be added to the leaderboard at the end of the competition

The maximum achievable score for the PvP part is equal to the total score available from case studies

There is discretion on our side, so in case of similar net liq between the top players, the top-1 will not receive the max score and so on

The top 3 of the leaderboard will receive: one month of Dune Plus, one month of Tenderly PRO, 3 months of Lighthouse PRO, and one month of the DefiLlama API

We will contact the winners using the provided email to arrange distribution of rewards or set up a communication channel with partners

During the Challenge, we'll monitor the performance of each participant

In the case of exceptional work, and if a participant has checked the "Consider joining Wintermute" checkbox in the profile, we may initiate the hiring process