How the game works.

01Overview

The game runs on three separate layers. Keeping them apart is the most important thing to understand:

The core loop: pay a small desk fee to clock in → trade on paper during your 20-minute shift → bank the alpha you made at The Vault → claim $HFW to your wallet.

02Getting started

1. Connect a Solana walletPhantom, Solflare or Backpack. Signing in is a message signature, not a transaction: it costs nothing and moves nothing.
2. Pick a name and a lookVest Bro, Quant, Closer, Degen or Intern. They're cosmetic, except that Interns walk a little faster.
3. Join or found a fundJoin a fund with an invite code or a request to its PM, or found your own. Founding burns about $5 of $HFW.
4. Walk to a desk and press EThe trading terminal opens. Your PM allocates you capital, and every member starts with a $1M allocation.

Controls: WASD or click to walk · drag to rotate · wheel to zoom · E interact · 1–6 emotes · Enter chat · M mic.

03Funds and the PM

Founding

Founding a fund burns about $5 worth of $HFW (100% burned, priced at the live market rate). You become the fund's Portfolio Manager (PM) for good, and the fund starts with $10,000,000 of fictional capital. Friends already in the room when you found it join automatically.

Capital and allocation

• Every member, the PM included, gets a $1M starter allocation from the fund's unallocated cash when they join.
• Only the PM can change allocations. An allocation can't be cut below what a member has in use plus their open losses.
• Fund NAV = unallocated cash + every member's equity. Each member's realized P&L rolls into the fund.

Membership

• Invite code: 8 characters. Any member can share it, and only the PM can replace it. Removed members can't reuse it.
• Requests: anyone can request to join. The PM approves or declines. Requests expire after 7 days, and a decline blocks new requests for 24 hours.
• Knocking: visitors knock to enter an office. A member lets them in with a one-time pass that lasts 60 seconds.
• There's no cap on members. The office holds 8 people at a time, and up to 4 of them can be visitors.

Bankruptcy

If NAV falls below $1,000, the fund is bankrupt. Only the PM can re-found it, which settles open positions, starts a new epoch at $10M and resets allocations.

04The trading desk

The office terminals trade paper positions on live market prices. The capital is fictional, but the prices, fees and liquidations follow real rules.

Order rules

Where prices come from

Crypto streams from Coinbase, with CoinGecko as the fallback. US stocks come from xStocks (tokenized shares on Solana) via Jupiter, then DexScreener, then Yahoo Finance. The server takes the price itself and never trusts one sent by a player.

05Paper trades vs real trades

There are two ways to trade in Hedge Fund Wars, and they work in completely different ways. PAPER is the office desk described above. REAL is an optional tab in the terminal that places real perpetual-futures trades from your own wallet.

How PAPER works under the hood

Paper trading is server-authoritative. Your terminal sends an order to the game server over a WebSocket. The server fills it from its own price feed at the first price at least 1.5 s after the order arrives, applies the fee and spread, and keeps the position, its margin and its liquidation price. Your browser only displays the result. The fill delay removes any edge from seeing a price before the server does, and because prices never come from the client, a modified client can't invent a better fill.

How REAL works under the hood

REAL is non-custodial. It trades on Velocity, the relaunch of Drift Protocol, a perpetual-futures exchange on Solana with USDT as collateral.

1. Your browser builds the transactionDeposit, order, close or withdraw: the REAL tab assembles the Velocity instruction in your browser, in a Velocity sub-account named "Hedge Fund Wars".
2. Your wallet signs itYour wallet shows exactly what it will do. Nothing happens unless you approve it.
3. It goes straight to SolanaThe signed transaction goes directly to the network. It never passes through our servers, and we never see or store a key.
4. Our server only readsFor market data (order book, candles, your account summary), the server relays Velocity's public read-only APIs, cached and rate-limited. It has no way to trade for you.
5. Fills are verified independentlyFor 2× XP, the server reads your fills from Velocity's public data, rebuilds your closed trades, and counts each one once by its transaction signature. Nothing you report yourself is ever trusted.

Velocity is cross-margined, so a closed REAL trade has no margin of its own. For XP it's scored as if the trade were put up at 5×, then doubled. REAL trades count toward milestones (Real Deal: your first verified REAL trade, +250 XP) and toward RANK. Hedge Fund Wars currently takes no fee on REAL trades.

06The Trading Day: shifts and alpha

Paper trading is free. Earning works in shifts: you pay a small desk fee to clock in, and profitable trades during the shift become alpha.

1. Clock inPay the desk fee (about $0.50 of $HFW at the live price) from your wallet. Your 20-minute shift starts.
2. TradePositions you open and close during the shift earn alpha: every +0.1% net return (after fees) is 1 alpha. Losses and liquidations take alpha away, but unbanked alpha never goes below zero.
3. Bank at The VaultWalk to The Vault in your office and press E before the closing bell. Banking turns your alpha into a $HFW balance.
4. Closing bellWhen the shift ends, unbanked alpha is lost. That's getting REKT.

• Return is measured on your capital base: your allocation plus any realized profit, fixed when you place the order.
• Each shift can earn at most 80 alpha, and each wallet at most 150 alpha per UTC day. These are hard caps.
• One shift at a time. The game refuses to take your fee if today's payout budget is spent or you've hit your daily cap, so you never pay for a shift that can't earn.
• Banking needs you on shift and standing at your fund's Vault. Visitors can't bank.

07The $HFW economy

$HFW is the game's token on Solana. Everything real in the economy flows through one wallet, the Fed: the reward pool that pays alpha. Every fee in the game is priced in US dollars and paid in $HFW at the live market price, so costs stay stable as the token moves.

Where $HFW goes

Every split happens inside one transaction you sign. The Fed's share goes straight to its token account and the burn uses Solana's token-program burn, so both are visible on chain. Burned $HFW is gone for good, so play shrinks the supply.

Where $HFW comes from

Banked alpha, paid from the Fed. The pay rate follows the pool automatically:

Example: with 10,000,000 $HFW free in the pool, 1 alpha pays 50 $HFW, a maximum day for one wallet (150 alpha) pays 7,500 $HFW, and the whole game can pay out at most 200,000 $HFW that day.

• The daily budget is a hard cap. Once it's spent, banking pauses until the next UTC day.
• The Fed can never pay more than 2% of its free pool in a day, so the pool can't be drained quickly, even by a bot that plays perfectly.
• Desk fees refill the pool (70% of every fee), so more play means a bigger pool and higher rates.
• XP and fund NAV are fictional and never convert to $HFW.

The live numbers are at the top of this page, and in the game at /api/stats.

08Payouts and claims

How a claim works

1. You request a claimThe amount moves from your balance to "pending", so it can't be spent or claimed twice.
2. The Fed co-signsThe server prepares a token transfer from the Fed to you, signed by the Fed and tagged with an on-chain memo (hfw-claim:<id>).
3. You sign and sendYour wallet signs as the fee payer and sends it. You pay the network fee (and your token-account rent the first time), never the Fed.
4. SettlementThe server confirms it on chain. If a claim can provably no longer land, it's refunded to your balance automatically. It's never paid twice.

• You receive the full amount. If $HFW ever has a transfer fee, the Fed adds it on top.
• Balances are always rounded down (6 decimals), so rounding never overpays.
• One claim can be pending at a time.

09XP, levels and RANK

XP rewards patient, accurate trading. It's fictional: it levels you and your fund up, unlocks upgrades and sets your rank.

Earning XP

A trade earns XP only if its notional is at least $10,000 and it's held at least 5 minutes. Repeatable XP is capped at 2,000 per UTC day. Milestone bonuses don't count toward the cap.

Levels

Levels 1–8 at 0, 500, 1.5k, 4k, 10k, 25k, 60k and 150k XP. A fund's XP is what its members earned trading for it, and its level gates its upgrades.

Milestones

Thirteen one-time milestones, worth 50 to 5,000 XP. Examples: First Blood (first profitable close), Hot Hand (5 winners in a row), Ten Bagger (+10% on margin in one trade), Diamond Hands (a winner held 24 h+), fund NAV at $11M, $15M, $25M, $50M and $100M, and Real Deal (your first verified REAL trade).

RANK: accuracy over time

RANK scores the last 30 days of XP-eligible trades, and you need 20 trades for full weight:

The +2 / +4 smoothing means a 1-for-1 streak doesn't count as 100%. Consistency beats one lucky trade.

Fund upgrades

Bought by the PM in $HFW (50% to the Fed, 50% burned) and gated by fund level. Upgrades are cosmetic or add capacity. None change odds, fees or earnings.

10Wall Street and social

• Wall Street is the shared outdoor hub. Every fund has a building there (up to 48 lots per world), and better-ranked funds sit closest to the exchange. Street worlds hold 40 players, and crews are placed together.
• Voice: in your office, everyone in the room hears you. On Wall Street, players near you hear you (fading out with distance), and your crew hears you anywhere in the world on crew radio.
• Chat: up to 140 characters. Emotes on keys 1–6: BUY BUY BUY, SELL!!, WAGMI, REKT, CHEST THUMP and FLEX (which shows your fund's rank and NAV).
• Espresso in the office gives a short speed boost.

11Security and fairness

• Wallet sign-in is an ed25519 message signature bound to this domain and a one-time nonce. It can't move funds, and it can't be replayed.
• Every payment is verified on chain. The server checks the mint, the recipient and the amount of every desk fee, founding burn and upgrade, and each transaction signature can be used only once.
• The server is authoritative. Prices, fills, P&L, alpha, XP and payouts are all computed server-side from its own data. The client only displays.
• Hard limits: an 80-alpha cap per shift, 150 per wallet per day, a 2%-per-day payout budget, a 1-hour claim cooldown, and one pending claim at a time.
• Pause switches: the operators can pause clock-ins or claims at any time. Banked balances stay safe while paused, and claims already in flight still settle.
• REAL mode is non-custodial. Your keys and funds never leave your wallet.

12FAQ

13Risks