How it really works.
The landing page gives you the pitch. This page gives you the mechanics — every fee, every rule, every step of the draw — so you can decide with the full picture, or verify it yourself.
Fees, exactly
Housecat earns through Hyperliquid builder codes — a native L1 mechanism where a frontend receives a fee on orders it routes, capped by an approval you sign and can revoke at any time. Fees are processed inside Hyperliquid's own fee logic, on-chain. We never touch your order flow beyond attaching our code.
| Action | Housecat fee | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Perp trade — any fill (open or close) | 5 bps | Charged on every fill, win or lose — this funds the loaded-card prizes + protocol. Matches pvp.trade (0.05%), half of Hyperliquid's 0.1% perp cap |
| Spot sell (memecoin surface) | 0.5% | Sell side only — builder fees don't apply to spot buys |
| Spot buy | 0 | Protocol rule, not ours |
| Staking via the Housecat validator | market-rate commission | Same as comparable validators; the commission funds delegator bonus mints + protocol |
How tickets work
Tickets are computed from public chain data, never from a private database. Anyone can recompute the ticket ledger for any week.
| Source | Rate | Anti-abuse |
|---|---|---|
| Routed perp volume | 1 per $10K filled | From Hyperliquid's daily published builder-code fill logs |
| Spot sells (memecoin surface) | 1 per $1K sold | Same public fill data |
| Staking with the Housecat validator | 1 per 100 HYPE per epoch | Based on minimum balance held during the epoch — flash deposits earn nothing |
| Daily streak (show up every day) | +2% / day, up to +50% | Any trade or stake advances it once per UTC day; a missed day resets it — unless you're staked, which insures it |
| Weekly streak & referrals | multipliers up to 2× | Applied at snapshot, visible in the published entry list |
The epoch-minimum rule matters: it's Hyperliquid's own reward accounting, which means ticket farming by depositing before a snapshot and leaving after is structurally impossible — and the 1-day delegation lock plus 7-day unstaking queue make hit-and-run delegation uneconomic.
The draw, step by step
Entries lock
Sunday 00:00 UTC: the week's ticket ledger is finalized and its merkle root is published. Nothing can be added or changed after this moment.
Randomness is pre-committed
We announce the specific future drand round that will decide the winner. drand is a public randomness beacon run by independent organizations — its output can't be predicted or influenced by us or anyone.
The draw, live
Friday 21:00 UTC on the live stream: the pre-announced round lands, the winning ticket is derived as randomness mod total_tickets, and the winner is read from the locked ledger.
Payout in minutes
At launch, the full pot will be sent from the prize multisig to the winning wallet, and the transaction hash posted publicly — every draw, every week.
Verify any past draw yourself with the open-source verifier:
entries root … ✓ drand #4188207 … ✓ payout tx … ✓
The pool & payouts
Collected fees split cleanly: a published share funds the loaded cards (the USDC prizes) and the rest is protocol revenue. There is no pot and no multisig — loaded cards pay out instantly from the fee flow the moment a fill mints one, so nothing ever accumulates in one place to hack or hold in trust.
Buffer-capped, always. A loaded card can only pay from fees already collected — never from anyone's pocket. Early on, a large hit on a big fill is capped/scaled to the banked buffer; as volume grows, so does the ceiling. The published RTP (~62% of fees returned as loaded cards) and the full fee→payout history live on the public dashboard, and your own personal RTP shows live in the terminal.
Loaded cards
Every fill mints a card, and some are loaded — they carry an instant USDC payout of 1× to 50× the fill's builder fee, paid the moment the card mints. No draw, no waiting.
Three independent, verifiable rolls come off each fill: which card you got (rarity-weighted), whether it's shiny (~1 in 50), and whether it's loaded and by how much. Each derives from the fill's identifier combined with the nearest subsequent drand round — we can't choose your card, exclude anyone, or fake a loaded hit. Run npx housecat verify --card <fillId> and reproduce any mint yourself.
Golden Happy Hour. Every day from 20:00–21:00 UTC, every fill's golden threshold is tripled — 3× the odds of an instant win. It stays fully provable: the boost is derived from the fill's own timestamp, so the verifier simply reads the fill's UTC hour and reproduces the exact same threshold. A shared daily event, zero fairness tradeoff.
The Fat Cat & the Season Finale
The Fat Cat is the progressive pot. Ten percent of every week's pot share flows into it, and it does not draw weekly. Instead, every Friday the draw's drand round also decides — at published 1-in-10 odds — whether the Fat Cat goes off. When it triggers, the entire accumulated balance pays out to one ticket from that week's ledger, and the Fat Cat starts again from zero. It can go off on week two or grow for six months; nobody, including us, knows which — that's the point, and it's pre-committed randomness, so it's provable.
The Season Finale is where points get their first concrete value. At season end, every Season point converts to entries in a single mega draw — the largest pot of the season, seeded from accumulated protocol share and sponsor boosts. Points are all-time within a season, so everything you've done since day one counts. Whether points ever become anything else has not been announced.
The validator
Delegating to the Housecat validator uses Hyperliquid's native staking — your HYPE never leaves the protocol's own staking system and is never held by us. You earn the normal network staking yield minus a market-rate commission, exactly as with any validator. The difference: our commission flows to the pot, and your delegation mints tickets every epoch.
Facts worth knowing before you delegate anywhere: delegations have a 1-day lock; moving stake back to your spot balance takes a 7-day unstaking queue; Hyperliquid currently implements no automatic slashing (underperforming validators are jailed and simply stop earning); and validator commission rules prevent bait-and-switch — a validator can't raise its rate on you except to 1% or below.
Custody & security
Housecat holds no user funds, ever. Your trading balance lives in your own Hyperliquid account. Your stake lives in native staking. There are no Housecat deposit contracts, vaults, or pools — which is also why there's nothing for an exploiter to drain. The only money we will hold is the prize pot (multisig, see above) and our own revenue.
What you actually trust when you use Housecat: that the frontend you're signing orders on is genuine (check the domain, always), and that the operator pays the draw — which is why every historical payout is public and the randomness is out of our hands. We designed the system so the honest answer to "what can Housecat steal?" is: this week's pot, once, on camera, ending the business. That's the whole security model, and we think it's a better one than "trust our audit."