The machine that does the killing.
Market microstructure goes in. Features become hypotheses, hypotheses get a criterion locked in writing, and then the tests run. Almost nothing survives. That funnel, run at this volume, is the work: it is far cheaper to kill a bad idea than to trade it.
Counts are real and re-derived from the repository. The flow is an illustration of the pipeline, not a measured throughput. Nothing here uses private data.
Market data
Sub-second order-book and trade data from Hyperliquid, collected continuously. The raw material.
Features
The signals we derive from it: funding, basis, volatility, flow. Candidates, not conclusions.
Hypotheses
Each becomes a written prediction with a pass/fail line, locked before we look at the result.
Tests
The criterion runs against fresh data. Over 2,000 automated tests guard the machinery itself.
Verdicts
Almost everything is killed. What survives is rare, small, and only works at institutional scale.
Why it matters
A bot you can buy never shows this. The funnel is the proof the work was actually done.
Zero you could buy. Not zero that work.
Out of everything the funnel tested, two things survived a proper holdout. Neither is a product you could buy, and we will not hand over the signal. What we publish is the proof they exist: the validation, the sample, and exactly why each is an institutional play, not a retail bot.
Phantom Edge
Real edge, institutional-cost onlyWhen Hyperliquid's vault absorbs forced flow through a thin order book, the thinner the book, the harder price reverts afterwards, and it ranks perfectly across all ten thinness bands (a Spearman correlation of negative one, across 24,671 events). The directional trade on the most extreme tail did NOT survive: frozen and tested on fresh data it collapsed to +1.12 bps at p=0.449, a textbook case of an edge that lives in-sample and dies on contact. What survives is the relationship itself, a real piece of market structure that did not exist in the literature before.
The catch. This is a quoting input, not a bot you could buy. Every measured effect (2.63 bps reversion at 60 minutes) sits below the retail cost to trade it, and it only crosses into profit at institutional fee tiers. It is capacity-bounded to thin-book assets. We show the exact economics below rather than imply a return.
Asia Range
On trial, sample too thin to bankA session-liquidity breakout on BTC was the only thing left standing after a proper holdout test killed the same idea on ETH, SOL and HYPE. Out-of-sample expectancy was +0.188R per trade, against +0.189R in training, near-zero decay, on the single asset and filter that survived.
The catch. On just 19 out-of-sample trades, which is thin enough that it could still be noise, and we say so in our own notes. It has only ever been paper-traded, never run with real capital. We publish it as a survivor on trial, not a proven winner.
The edge is real. Your fee tier decides if you keep it.
The move is fixed at 2.63 bps. To capture it you enter and exit as a maker, so your cost is two maker fees. At retail rates that is more than the edge, so you lose. As your 14-day volume climbs Hyperliquid's real fee tiers, the maker fee falls, and somewhere on this ladder the edge crosses into profit.
| Fee tier | 14-day volume | Maker / leg | Round trip | Net on the edge | Capital needed |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Base | under $5M | 1.5 | 3.0 | −0.4 bps | share-gated |
| Tier 1turns on | over $5M | 1.2 | 2.4 | +0.2 bps | $250k |
| Tier 2 | over $25M | 0.8 | 1.6 | +1.0 bps | $1.3M |
| Tier 3 | over $100M | 0.4 | 0.8 | +1.8 bps | $5M |
| Tier 4 | over $500M | 0.0 | 0.0 | +2.6 bps | $25M |
| Top maker-rebate | top maker share | -0.3 | -0.6 | +3.2 bps | share-gated |
The honest catch. 2.63 bps is the density-gradient reversion, the robust structure. The directional trade on the most extreme events died on fresh data. It is capacity-bounded to thin-book assets, and net stays a thin sliver even past the line. This is what “killed at retail cost” means: not no edge, an edge only an institution's fee tier can reach. Fee tiers are Hyperliquid's published schedule; the effect size is our own measurement.