The First Mover Advantage: Trade the First 10 Minutes, Win saveUSDST

The CrossMint Circuit paid whoever traded the most. The First Mover Advantage also pays whoever trades first.

From Wednesday, September 30 at 11:00 AM ET to Wednesday, October 7 at 11:00 AM ET, STRATO Odds runs its third trading competition. It has two boards and 20 prize places, with $1,725 in saveUSDST plus 7 oz of yieldSILVST on the line. A single wallet can win on both boards.

As always, there's nothing to sign up for. Trade during the week and you're on the board.

Table of Contents

• The 10-minute Early Window
• What's on the line
• How scoring works
• What STRATO Odds is
• Liquidity through the week
• The week at a glance
• How to get started

The 10-minute Early Window

Every new hourly market opened during the competition starts with a 10-minute Early Window, timed from the moment the market is created. Each fill of at least 1 USDST inside that window counts as one Early Bid. There's no limit per wallet or per market, so every qualifying fill counts.

Why reward speed? A new market is at its most mispriced right when it opens, before the book has settled on a price. That's the stretch most traders miss, and this week it's the stretch that pays.

An example: a market opens at 15:00:20 UTC, so its Early Window runs until 15:10:20. You buy 5 USDST of YES at 15:02 and sell it at 15:07. That's two Early Bids and 10 USDST of volume. Once the 10 minutes are up, your trades still count toward Overall Volume, just not toward Early Bids.

Only the hourly markets have Early Windows. The daily series doesn't earn Early Bids.

What's on the line

Rank	Overall Volume	First Mover
1st	$500 in saveUSDST	$300 in saveUSDST
2nd	$300 in saveUSDST	$200 in saveUSDST
3rd	$150 in saveUSDST	$100 in saveUSDST
4th–10th	1 oz yieldSILVST each	$25 in saveUSDST each

That's $950 on the Overall Volume board, $775 on the First Mover board, and a 7 oz pool of tokenized silver: 20 paying places in total.

Cash prizes pay out in saveUSDST, the ERC-4626 savings-vault version of the STRATO dollar, so your prize earns yield as soon as it lands. Ranks 4 through 10 on the volume board take yieldSILVST, tokenized silver that keeps earning on STRATO after you receive it.

How scoring works

Overall Volume ranks the USDST you actually get filled during the window, buys and sells alike. First Mover ranks your count of Early Bids. The two boards are scored independently from the same fills, so an early trade counts on both.

A few rules apply to both boards this edition:

• Only fills count. Unfilled orders, splits and merges don't. An order that rests unfilled scores nothing until it fills.
• 1 USDST minimum per fill, fees excluded. Smaller fills never count and don't add up to one that does. Each partial fill counts as its own fill.
• Voided markets drop out. Every fill in a market that settles as void is removed, so a score can go down if a market gets voided.
• Ties go to whoever reached their final score first.
• One entry per person. The platform market maker, house, staff and designated liquidity wallets are excluded.

What STRATO Odds is

STRATO Odds is a prediction market on BlockApps STRATO. Every market asks a yes-or-no question about a price: will gold be above a given level at 3 PM, or will Bitcoin hold its level through the end of the hour?

You back YES or NO with USDST, the STRATO stable dollar. Every winning token pays exactly 1 USDST when the market settles against the on-chain price oracle. New markets open every hour across commodities, crypto, stocks and the wildcard corner.

Settlement and the leaderboard both read straight from the chain, so there's no separate scoreboard you have to trust.

Liquidity through the week

Thin order books kill trading competitions, so this one comes funded. The desk tops up the books while the competition is running, so there's depth when each new hourly market opens. If a book is thinner than you'd like when you arrive, the app will tell you.

The week at a glance

When	What
Sep 30, 11:00 AM ET	Kickoff. Both boards start counting, and the first Early Windows open with the first hourly markets
Every hour, Sep 30 – Oct 7	Each new hourly market opens a 10-minute Early Window
Midweek	Standings check-in on X for both boards
Oct 7, 11:00 AM ET	Closing bell. The top 10 on each board are announced, and prizes follow verification

Last week's CrossMint Circuit final standings are still up in the Arena.

How to get started

1. Go to stratoodds.com and connect a wallet. STRATO Wallet creates an account in seconds, and MetaMask and WalletConnect work too.
2. Fund it with USDST: bridge USDC in from another chain, then swap, all inside the app.
3. Be there when the hourly markets roll over at the top of every hour. Trade in the first 10 minutes for Early Bids, and keep trading to build your Overall Volume.

Live standings run in the Arena all week.

Start Trading

Follow @strato_net for midweek standings, and join the conversation in Discord.