Knowledge Base
Everything you need to understand BitBreakout — what it is, how the contest works, how the trading terminal behaves, and how prizes are paid. This is a demo-trading skills competition: you never deposit or risk your own money, and the balances you trade are virtual.
On this page
1. About BitBreakout
What is BitBreakout?
BitBreakout is a simulated (demo) trading platform built around a contest. You trade four cryptocurrency perpetual-futures markets — BTC-PERP, ETH-PERP, SOL-PERP and XRP-PERP — using a virtual balance, and you compete against other participants to finish the season with the highest account equity. The best performers win cash prizes.
BitBreakout is not a broker, an exchange, a custodian, or a regulated trading venue. No real money is traded by participants, and the equity shown in your account is fictional. The goal is to learn how real perpetual-futures markets behave and to develop and test trading strategies in a realistic but risk-free environment. A typical season runs for 90 days with up to 100 participants.
How BitBreakout is different from a real trading platform
BitBreakout deliberately mirrors the experience of a real venue while removing the real-money parts:
- No user funds are ever held. There are no deposits or withdrawals. Winners receive a cash prize; they do not withdraw a balance.
- Orders are simulated. Your orders are matched inside BitBreakout against a live reference order book; they are never routed to a real exchange and never affect any real market.
- The leaderboard is the product. Your score is your account equity, not real profit.
Because of this, features that depend on real capital — deposits, withdrawals, and margin calls against real money — do not exist. But the things that make trading realistic are enforced: real-time prices, order fills, leverage, initial and maintenance margin, trading fees, funding, and liquidations all behave much like a real perpetual-futures venue.
Who runs the platform
The Service is operated by BitBreakout LLC, a limited liability company registered in the State of Wyoming, United States. On 29 July 2025 the Financial Services Authority of Seychelles confirmed in writing that, based on the activities described, BitBreakout does not fall within the scope of the Virtual Asset Service Providers (VASP) Act — because no real money is involved beyond the cash prize, no custody is provided, and all trading happens through demo accounts. See the Terms of Service for the full regulatory statement.
2. Getting started
Creating your account
To create an account we ask for your first name, last name, email address, a password, and your country of residence. You also tick two boxes: one to accept the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy, and one to confirm you are eligible to use the Service (you are at least 18 and not resident in a restricted jurisdiction).
We do not ask for demographic information at sign-up. The risk questionnaire, offered later and separately, is optional and does not affect your ability to take part or win. If you choose to complete your account profile, the profile form asks its demographic and experience questions (such as trading experience) as a set, but completing your profile is not required to participate.
Your password must be at least 10 characters and include an uppercase letter, a lowercase letter, and a number. Spaces are not allowed; special characters are allowed but not required.
After you register we send a verification link to your email. The link is valid for 24 hours. You must verify your email before you can join a contest. If the email does not arrive, check your spam folder, make sure the address is spelled correctly, and add bitbreakout.com to your contacts; you can request a fresh link from the sign-in screen.
Joining a contest (the waitlist)
Open the Contests page to see the current and upcoming seasons. Each contest card shows the virtual starting balance, the prize pool, the maximum leverage, the registration window, and the start and end dates. Registration is free: during the registration window you join a waitlist, and up to 100 participants are then selected at random from the waitlist. If you are selected, we invite you to confirm your place; selection and confirmation may continue up to a final confirmation date after registration closes.
To be eligible you must be at least 18, hold one (and only one) BitBreakout account, and not be a resident of a restricted jurisdiction. See Eligibility below and the Contest Rules for the full list.
Your first demo trade
Once you are confirmed into a contest, open the trading terminal, pick a market (for example BTC-PERP), set your size, and click Buy/Long or Sell/Short. For a complete walkthrough with screenshots, see the Platform Tutorial. Common first-time mistakes: setting the size too large for your margin, trading the wrong side, or forgetting that leverage multiplies both gains and losses.
3. How the contest works
Structure and key parameters (Season 1)
| Parameter | Value |
|---|---|
| Duration | 90 calendar days (start and end times published on the contest page, in UTC) |
| Participants | Up to 100 |
| Entry | Free — no application or participation fee |
| Starting balance | The same virtual balance for everyone, shown on the contest page (Season 1: 100,000 units, displayed as USDT) |
| Markets | BTC-PERP, ETH-PERP, SOL-PERP, XRP-PERP (perpetual-style, demo only) |
| Maximum leverage | 10x |
| Prize pool | US$8,000 — $5,000 (1st), $2,000 (2nd), $1,000 (3rd) |
Parameters can change between seasons; the values that apply to your contest are always shown on its contest page and in the Contest Rules.
How you are scored
At the end of the contest, participants are ranked by the total equity of their contest wallet. Equity is the sum of your available balance, any balance on hold for open orders, and the mark-to-market value of your open positions — in short, your cash plus the current value of everything you are holding. In the terminal this is reflected live as your available margin and your unrealised profit and loss (PnL).
If two or more participants finish with identical equity, ties are broken in this order:
- highest realised profit over the season;
- lowest maximum drawdown (the largest peak-to-trough drop in equity during the season);
- fewest disqualification warnings; and
- earliest registration time.
Fees and costs simulated in the contest
BitBreakout charges the same kinds of costs you would face on a real venue, deducted from your virtual balance:
| Cost | Rate | How it applies |
|---|---|---|
| Taker fee | 0.04% of notional | When your order removes liquidity (e.g. a market order, or a limit order that fills immediately). |
| Maker fee | 0.02% of notional | When your resting limit order adds liquidity and is later filled. |
| Funding | Live funding rate | Periodically exchanged between longs and shorts, just like a real perpetual. The current rate and the countdown to the next funding are shown at the top of the terminal. |
| Liquidation fee | 0.04% of notional | Applied only if a position is force-closed (liquidated). |
Slippage on market orders. A market order is filled against the live order book at the volume-weighted average price of the levels it consumes — it has no protective price cap. It prioritises getting filled over the price you get, so in a thin or fast-moving market it can fill meaningfully away from the last price you saw, and a large order fills across several price levels. If you need price certainty, use a limit order, which never fills worse than the price you set.
Prizes and payouts
The Season 1 prize pool is US$8,000, split $5,000 / $2,000 / $1,000 to the top three by final equity. Prizes are denominated in US dollars and are most commonly paid in USDC stablecoin (on Ethereum or Solana) to a verified self-custodied wallet; a US-dollar bank transfer may be offered where that is more practical. Payment is made only after identity verification and sanctions screening. See Prizes & winner verification for the full process and timeline.
Rule violations and disqualification
The following are prohibited and can lead to warnings, disqualification, forfeiture of any prize, and a ban from future contests:
- operating more than one account, or entering on behalf of someone else;
- coordinating or colluding with other participants, including transferring virtual balance through offsetting trades;
- using bots, scripts, or browser automation to place, modify, or cancel orders (all order entry must be manual through the interface);
- exploiting a bug, a stale price, a latency advantage, or any other error condition.
We may monitor activity for integrity purposes and investigate suspected breaches. Decisions are made at our discretion; you can appeal by contacting support. Full terms are in the Contest Rules and Terms of Service.
Disputing a trade or a leaderboard position
If you believe a fill, a fee, or your equity is wrong, contact support with the order ID, the market, the timestamp (UTC), and a screenshot. We can correct genuine data errors or matching bugs. We will not reverse fills that were valid at the time, even if the market then moved against you. You can export your full order, trade, and wallet history as CSV from the Transaction Log to support a dispute.
4. Using the trading terminal
Order types
The terminal supports three order types, plus a reduce-only flag:
- Market — fills immediately by walking the order book until your full size is filled, at the volume-weighted average price of the levels consumed. It has no price cap, so it can incur slippage (see above).
- Limit — rests in the order book and fills only at your chosen price or better. A resting limit order that adds liquidity earns the lower maker fee.
- Stop-Market — a trigger order that becomes a market order when the price reaches your stop. Use it as a protective stop-loss or a breakout entry. A buy stop must be set above the current price; a sell stop must be set below it.
Reduce-Only can be ticked so an order can only shrink or close an existing position, never flip or increase it. Reduce-only orders do not require additional margin.
Leverage and margin
Leverage lets you control a larger position than your margin alone. The contest maximum is 10x. Your buying power (“Power” in the terminal) equals your available margin multiplied by your leverage — for example, 100,000 USDT at 10x gives 1,000,000 USDT of buying power.
BitBreakout uses a standard margin model. Your single account balance backs all of your open positions, but every position is margined on its own notional value — there is no hedging discount. A long and a short in different markets do not cancel each other out: their notionals are added together, so holding both uses more margin, not less. Two numbers govern risk, shown as the IM and MM meters at the top of the terminal:
- Initial margin (IM) controls whether you can open or add to a position. It is a ratio: your total gross notional (the sum of the absolute notional of every open position, plus the order you are placing) ÷ (your equity × your leverage). An order is rejected if it would push this above 100% — at 10x, that means your total position size can be at most ten times your equity.
- Maintenance margin (MM) = total gross notional × 0.8%. This is the minimum equity your positions must keep. If your equity falls to your maintenance margin, the liquidation engine steps in.
Equity is your wallet balance plus the unrealised profit and loss of all open positions.
NoteThis example holds the maintenance margin fixed at 4,800 USDT to keep the maths simple. In reality the position’s notional shrinks as the price falls, so the maintenance margin shrinks with it — which lowers the liquidation price slightly, to about 63,004 USDT. That shrinking-notional calculation is exactly what the trading engine does.
Because every position draws on the same account balance, keeping spare balance pushes your liquidation prices further away, while using more leverage or opening more positions brings them closer. The terminal always shows your exact estimated liquidation price for each position.
How liquidation works. If your equity reaches your maintenance margin, the engine reduces every open position by 70% with a market close, then re-checks immediately (the price may have moved). Any position whose notional is already below 50,000 is closed in full, and once your total remaining notional is under 50,000 everything is closed at once. The 0.04% taker fee applies to each close, and funding (charged every 8 hours) is applied to your equity first, so it can tip you into liquidation between checks.
The chart
The chart offers multiple timeframes (5m, 30m, 1h, 4h, 1d) and is fed by the same live market data as the order book and recent-trades tape. If data briefly stops updating, a degraded-data banner appears (see Troubleshooting).
Positions, orders, and the order book
Open positions show your size, entry price, mark price, leverage, unrealised PnL, and estimated liquidation price, all updating in real time. The order book and recent-trades tape on the right show live depth and executions. A position is marked to the live mark price, which can differ momentarily from the last traded price you see on the tape — this is normal and self-corrects.
Trade history and exports
The Transaction Log has three tabs — Order History, Trade History, and Wallet Ledger — each with symbol and UTC date-range filters and a Download CSV button. The Wallet Ledger records every balance change (fills, fees, funding, liquidations). Additional summaries are available under Stats and Reports.
5. Data, fairness & integrity
Where our market data comes from
Prices, the order book, and the trades tape are real-time market data sourced from leading third-party cryptocurrency exchanges and streamed to your browser over a websocket. The platform draws reference pricing from a primary exchange, with a secondary exchange kept on standby as a fallback in case the primary feed is interrupted — so every participant always sees the same reference data at the same time. We do not name the upstream venues; price, funding, and liquidation behaviour are intended to approximate a real perpetual-futures venue but are not identical to any one venue and may differ.
How trades are filled
Your orders are matched inside BitBreakout’s simulation engine against this live reference order book. Nothing is routed to a real exchange. A market order walks the book and fills at the volume-weighted average price of the levels it consumes, with no price cap, so its fill approximates — and in a thin or fast market can differ noticeably from — the last price shown, just as on a real venue.
How we keep the contest fair
- One account per person. Multi-accounting is detected and is grounds for disqualification.
- Manual trading only. Bots, scripts, and browser automation are banned for Season 1 unless we whitelist them in writing in advance.
- Rate limiting. The order API accepts up to roughly 100 requests per minute per account. Manual trading never approaches this; the limit exists to stop automated abuse. Sign-in is separately limited, and repeated failed logins trigger a temporary 15-minute lockout.
- Audit trail. We retain order, fill, and balance records so disputes can be investigated.
Outages and degraded data
If the primary feed is interrupted, the platform fails over to the secondary exchange and automatically reconnects and resynchronises, showing a degraded-data banner in the meantime; if data looks stale, refreshing your browser usually clears it. If the Service is unavailable for a material period during a contest, we may extend the contest, void affected trades, roll back balances, or take other action we consider fair, as set out in the Contest Rules.
6. Prizes & winner verification
Who is eligible to win
To win a prize you must be at least 18, hold a single account, and not be a resident of a restricted jurisdiction. Restricted jurisdictions currently include the United States, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria, Myanmar, and the Crimea, Donetsk, and Luhansk regions. Residents of Russia or Belarus may take part but cannot receive monetary prizes while resident there, unless they can show residence in a non-restricted jurisdiction at payout. Employees, officers, contractors, and their immediate family are not eligible. See the Terms and Contest Rules.
Winner identity verification (KYC)
Before any prize is paid, winners complete identity verification and sanctions screening. This typically requires a government-issued photo ID, proof of residential address dated within the last three months, and, where applicable, a tax-identification number. Verification must be completed within 14 days of the contest end; a winner who does not complete it within that window forfeits the prize (which may then pass to the next eligible participant). KYC documents are retained only as long as required by applicable anti-money-laundering and tax law — see Privacy Policy.
Payout methods and timing
Prizes are denominated in US dollars and usually paid in USDC to a verified self-custodied wallet on Ethereum or Solana; a US-dollar bank transfer may be offered where more practical. The method, network, and any exchange rate are confirmed to each winner before payment. The target window is 30 days from the contest end — up to 7 days for a results audit and dispute window, up to 7 days for identity verification, and the remainder for sanctions screening and payment. Sanctions screening is run against the OFAC, UN, EU, and UK lists; a winner flagged by screening cannot be paid.
Tax
You are solely responsible for any tax on a prize in your jurisdiction. We may be required to withhold or deduct amounts where applicable law requires it. BitBreakout does not provide tax advice; consult your local tax authority or a professional.
7. Account, privacy & legal
Managing your account
From My Account you can update your name, email, and country, and complete or update your profile details. You can reset your password from the sign-in screen using “Forgot password”. You can delete your account yourself from Settings. When you delete, we erase or anonymise personal data we are not required to keep; some records (for example contest-participation and tax-related records) are retained for a limited period as described in the Privacy Policy.
Your privacy rights
Depending on where you live, you may have rights to access, correct, erase, restrict, object to, or port your personal data, and to withdraw consent. To exercise any of these, email privacy@bitbreakout.com. We typically respond within one month. Full detail is in the Privacy Policy.
What we do with your trading-activity data
We use your trading-activity data to run the contest and keep it fair. As described in the Privacy Policy, we also analyse pseudonymised and aggregated trading activity for research, analytics, and product development, and to develop data-based products and services. We do not sell your personal data. For the exact wording, see section 6 of the Privacy Policy; the FAQ answers the common questions directly.
Cookies and tracking
We use cookies to keep you signed in, remember preferences, and measure usage. Analytics are cookieless where possible. You can manage non-essential cookies through your browser; see the Privacy Policy.
Legal and jurisdiction
The Service is governed by the laws of the State of Wyoming, United States. See the Terms of Service for governing law, dispute resolution, and the full regulatory statement.
8. Troubleshooting
I can’t log in
Use “Forgot password” on the sign-in screen to reset your password. If your email is not recognised, confirm you are using the address you registered with. After several failed attempts, sign-in is locked for about 15 minutes as a security measure — wait and try again. If you still cannot get in, contact support.
My chart is showing stale or degraded data
A banner appears when the live market feed is briefly interrupted. The platform reconnects and resynchronises automatically — usually within seconds. You can also refresh the page and check your own internet connection. While data is degraded, prices may pause; this is a safeguard, not an error in your account.
My position shows a different price than the chart
Positions are valued at the mark price, which can differ momentarily from the last traded price on the tape. It self-corrects as data updates. If a difference persists or looks wrong, raise a dispute with the order ID and a timestamp.
The app is slow or unresponsive
Use a current version of Chrome, Edge, Firefox, or Safari, clear your cache, and close unused tabs. The terminal streams live data and benefits from a stable connection.
I’m not receiving emails
Check your spam folder, add bitbreakout.com to your contacts, and confirm your address is correct in My Account. You can request a new verification or password-reset email from the sign-in screen.
9. Contact support
Email support@bitbreakout.com or use the Contact Support page. Our target response time is 24 hours. For data and privacy requests, email privacy@bitbreakout.com. We do not offer live chat or phone support. If you are unhappy with an outcome, you can ask for it to be escalated for a further review.