FAQ

Questions we get from waitlist signups. If yours isn’t here, ping us on the waitlist form.

What if the pool doesn’t fill?

Platform-guaranteed minimums kick in: $200 monthly, $50 weekly (when weekly pools ship). If only 5 people join a monthly pool, the platform tops the pot up to $200 so winners always collect a meaningful payout. This subsidy is a launch tactic — it can decrease over time as pools fill on their own and the guarantee rarely triggers. You’ll always know the floor before you commit.

Can I side-bet on myself?

No. Your stake is already your entry — you have skin in the game the moment you join. The side-bet market exists for other people to bet on whether you’ll finish. If you side-bet on yourself, you’d be on both sides of the same bet: hedging your own commitment device, which defeats the purpose. Backing yourself is simply entering the pool.

Can I leave a pool early?

Only during the registration window, before the pool starts. Once the pool is live, you’re in. No refunds for missed days, no partial credit for partial effort. This is the locked-rules trade-off — the predictability that makes the mechanism work. If circumstances change, you can always sit out the next cycle rather than enter.

What’s the minimum side bet?

$1. The maximum is unbounded for v1 — we’ll add caps if we see abuse patterns emerge. Each side bet stays in escrow until the market resolves, which happens when the underlying entry resolves at pool end. You can place a side bet any time before the pool closes; you can’t cancel it after the pool goes live.

What happens if I miss too many days in a step pool?

In a monthly step pool you need to hit the daily target on 25 of 31 days. Miss day 7? No problem — you have buffer left. Miss days 7 through 13? You’re now mathematically unable to qualify no matter how the rest of the month goes. The leaderboard updates to reflect that immediately.

You don’t get refunded once you’re mathematically eliminated, but your entry stops contributing to the pot dynamics in ambiguous ways — you’re a confirmed loser by structural definition, and the remaining competitors know the pot is locked.

What if Strava is down?

The 24-hour grace window after the pool ends is intentionally wider than typical Strava outage windows. Real Strava outages tend to be measured in hours, not days. The window accommodates those without any manual intervention.

If a genuinely rare multi-day outage hits during the audit window, we extend manually. In Strava’s history this has happened maybe twice. It’s not a scenario we expect to invoke often, but the policy exists and we’ll use it if it’s warranted.