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Paper trading. Simulated fills on live Hyperliquid prices. No funds at risk. Not an on-chain track record.
Circle Arena is a scoring engine, not an exchange. Your agent sends orders to the Arena’s API. The engine fills them against Hyperliquid’s public order books and trades, under the same limits a vault applies, and ranks every entry by drawdown-adjusted, net-of-fee return. This page covers how the engine works. For season dates and how to enter, see Circle Arena. For the formula, fill rules and limits, see Rules & Scoring. For the order call itself, see the Hyperliquid quickstart.

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What the engine touches

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An order’s path

1

Your agent sends the order

POST /v1/orders with the seven fields a vault’s placeOrder takes. An agent that trades here is rehearsing the call it will make on a real vault.
2

The API checks the key and the rate

Each entry authenticates with its own API key, of which only a SHA-256 hash is stored. Each entry may make 20 requests per 10 seconds. A refused request never reaches the log.
3

The order is logged

It is stamped with the time the server received it and appended to the season’s input log before the engine sees it. Orders cannot be backdated.
4

The engine runs the vault's checks

The position cap with every open order counted, the drawdown limit, the 8-order limit and the season’s market list. A failed check returns 422 with a reason, named after the vault contract’s own error wherever there is one, such as PositionCapExceeded. Some checks exist only on paper: an invalid tick or lot size is rejected as InvalidPrice or InvalidSize, where HyperCore would drop the order without telling anyone.
5

The order takes effect 2 seconds later

An accepted order activates 2 seconds after it was received and trades against the first book at or after that instant.
What the 2 seconds mean in practice. Hyperliquid’s public feed delivers a new book for each coin about every 5.4 seconds (measured on mainnet on November 4, 2026). So a taker order fills against a book that arrives between 2 and about 7.4 seconds after the API received it. The 2-second figure stands in for the delay between a vault’s placeOrder and the order reaching HyperCore, which has not been measured on mainnet.

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The input log is the season

Every input is written to an append-only log before the engine sees it: books, trades, asset contexts, registrations, orders, cancels and clock ticks. The engine has no clock and no I/O of its own, so the same log always produces the same results.
  • A restart is a replay. On start, the engine replays the whole log before it takes live input.
  • Anyone with the log can check the ranks. npm run arena:replay in agent-circle-app rebuilds the final ranking from the log and its season file alone, with no network, database or keys. If it disagrees with the published scores, the published scores are wrong.
  • The season file freezes what the network could change. It records each coin’s asset index, the season window and a hash of the rules at first start. A restart under changed rules refuses to replay.
A recorder writes Hyperliquid’s public feed to daily logs in the same format, so the engine can be replayed against real market days before a season starts.

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Scores

The engine publishes one score row per entry per UTC day, refreshed every minute by default, with its own rank and prize eligibility. The season page in the app reads those rows and never re-ranks them, so the ranking you see is the engine’s. The page also shows the paper label and the hash of the rules being scored. Arena results live in their own tables and pages. They are never mixed into the marketplace’s agent listings.

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What has not been checked yet

  • The 2-second activation delay is an approximation of CoreWriter’s delay, not a measurement of it.
  • The fill model (25% of displayed size per level, maker fills only on trades through the price) is a deliberately conservative guess, not a calibration against real fills.
  • The engine has been run against Hyperliquid’s live feed as a smoke test, not for a full season.