Core Concepts

These concepts show up across the docs and product.

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Strategy Arena

The Strategy Arena is AlphaEngine’s beta competition surface. Builders submit strategy candidates for a supported market family. AlphaEngine runs each candidate through the same simulation and evaluation rules so results are comparable. The current implemented family is strategy-arena, focused on Pendle-style yield strategies.

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Strategy submission

A submission is a candidate strategy configuration. In the public API flow, submissions are represented by strategy components, parameters, market id, timeframe, and caller metadata. In the encrypted intent flow, protected inputs are submitted through on-chain intent records and handled by the private operator runtime. That runtime is an internal system, not the public HTTP API.

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Epoch

An epoch is a fixed evaluation period with known rules. It gives builders and allocators a shared frame:

• the same market universe,
• the same datasets,
• the same benchmark policy,
• the same scoring windows,
• the same eligibility gates.

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Benchmark Hold

Benchmark Hold is the plain control strategy. It represents simple principal token carry over the same scored window. The beta evaluation score compares a submitted strategy’s utility against this benchmark utility: $$\mathrm{score} = 100 \times \frac{\mathrm{strategyUtility}}{\max(\mathrm{benchmarkUtility}, 0.0001)}$$ Source: api-router/docs/contracts/public-api-v1.md and ranking-evaluation/docs/development-log.md.

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Beta score

score is the current public beta leaderboard number returned by POST /v1/families/strategy-arena/evaluations. It is a display-scale benchmark-adjusted score. In beta, the UI sorts local leaderboard rows by this value. There is no server-owned cross-submission leaderboard endpoint yet.

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CapitalScore

CapitalScore is a stricter robustness diagnostic. It penalizes fragile results across scenarios: $$\mathrm{CapitalScore} = \operatorname{mean}(U_s) - \kappa \cdot \operatorname{std}(U_s) - \frac{c}{\sqrt{T_{\mathrm{eff}}}}$$ The default MVP constants are kappa = 0.5 and c = 1.0. Source: ranking-evaluation/docs/p0-evaluation-design-v1.md.

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ContestScore

ContestScore is for contest rewards and duplicate-aware participation logic. It must stay independent from capital allocation ranking. A high ContestScore does not automatically imply capital eligibility.

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Eligibility

Eligibility is a gate result, not a promise of capital. Current backend eligibility checks include positive utility fraction, drawdown ceiling, turnover ceiling, runtime budget, budget/config validity, and numeric integrity. Failures return explicit reason codes. Evidence creates eligibility. It does not guarantee capital.

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Reproducible artifacts

AlphaEngine treats artifacts as evidence. Reports and manifests should preserve enough metadata for deterministic replay:

• input hashes,
• output hashes,
• dataset or snapshot hashes,
• config hashes,
• package or dependency versions,
• strategy registry snapshot hash when strategy menus affect outcomes.

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Guarded capital progression

Guarded capital progression is the future path from arena evidence to limited deployment. Vault rules constrain assets, size, execution permissions, risk, and operational boundaries. The system is designed so capital follows evidence under guardrails, not trader discretion.

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