7 Ways to Earn on Settled (Beyond Just Trading)
Most people see Settled and think "bet YES or NO on funding rates." That's one way to use it. There are at least seven.
Some are live right now. Some are coming. All of them create real economic opportunities that don't exist anywhere else in crypto. Here's the full map.
1. Trade Funding Rate Markets
Status: Live now
The core product. Buy YES or NO shares on whether a funding rate will be positive at settlement. Markets resolve every 1-8 hours across Binance, Bybit, KuCoin, Gate, and Hyperliquid.
Why this is different from gambling: funding rates are mean-reverting. They follow an Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process — the same math used to model interest rates in traditional finance. That means they're statistically predictable. Settled's pricing model uses 9.2 million historical settlements to seed each market's starting price.
The edge: When the crowd is 80% short and funding is deeply negative, the rate is likely to snap back toward zero. That's not a coin flip — that's a quantifiable signal. The crowd page at settled.pro/crowd shows you this data in real time.
Realistic returns: A trader with 60% directional accuracy and proper position sizing can compound meaningfully. But this is trading — you need edge, discipline, and risk management. Don't treat it like a slot machine.
2. Run a Resolver (Earn Tips)
Status: Live now
Every market that closes needs to be resolved — someone submits a Switchboard oracle proof, and the on-chain program determines the outcome. The resolver who submits this transaction earns a tip: 10 basis points (0.1%) of the market's total trading volume.
The resolver daemon is open source: github.com/Zirodelta/resolver.
Clone it, point it at a Solana RPC, fund a wallet with SOL for gas, and you're earning tips on every market you resolve. No permission needed — the program verifies the oracle proof cryptographically, not the identity of the submitter.
The math: A market with $10,000 in total volume pays $10 to the resolver. Gas costs ~$0.001 per transaction on Solana. Even at modest volumes, the economics work. At scale, resolvers compete on speed — first valid submission wins.
This is the same model as Ethereum MEV bots but for prediction market settlement. The opportunity is permissionless and algorithmic.
3. Become a Founding Trader (0% Fees)
Status: Live now
The first 100 traders on Settled get permanently reduced fees:
| Rank | Fee Rate | Savings vs Default |
|---|---|---|
| Top 10 | 0% | 100% savings |
| Top 50 | 0.50% | 50% savings |
| Top 100 | 0.75% | 25% savings |
These rates are locked for 90 days after mainnet launch. They stack with ZDLT tier discounts — whichever gives you the lower fee wins.
You earn your rank by trading volume on devnet right now. The leaderboard at settled.pro/leaderboard is live. Top 10 means zero fees on every trade for the first three months of mainnet.
This is a head start that won't exist later. First movers get the best economics.
4. Hold ZDLT for Fee Discounts
Status: Live now (on-chain)
ZDLT is the protocol token. Hold it in your wallet and your trading fees drop automatically — the on-chain program reads your balance at trade time:
| ZDLT Held | Fee |
|---|---|
| 0 | 1.00% |
| 1,000,000 | 0.75% |
| 3,000,000 | 0.50% |
| 5,000,000 | 0.35% |
| 10,000,000 | 0.25% |
No staking. No lockup. No claiming. Just hold ZDLT in your wallet and the discount applies. The check happens on-chain — you can verify it in the Solana program source.
For active traders doing $10,000+/month in volume, the fee savings from holding ZDLT pay for themselves quickly.
5. Hold Conditional Tokens (Your Shares Are Real Assets)
Status: Live now
When you buy YES or NO shares on Settled, you receive real Token-2022 SPL tokens in your wallet. They have on-chain metadata — name, symbol, market info — and show up in Phantom, Solflare, and Solana Explorer.
These tokens are transferable. No freeze authority on the mint. That means:
- You can send them to another wallet. Gift, sell, or distribute shares however you want.
- Portfolio trackers see them. Your positions show up in any Solana portfolio tool that supports Token-2022.
- Future composability. When Jupiter or Raydium support Token-2022 pairs, conditional tokens could trade on secondary markets. A YES token trading at 80¢ before settlement is a market-priced probability. Someone who believes the rate will be positive buys it from someone who doesn't — without either of them touching Settled's AMM.
This isn't a theoretical benefit — the tokens exist on-chain right now. Go to explorer.solana.com and look up any trade. You'll see the Token-2022 mint, the metadata, the transfer.
6. Deploy Your Own Market Series (Coming Soon)
Status: Design locked. Implementation after mainnet volume is proven.
Burn 1,000,000 ZDLT to deploy a series — a persistent symbol+exchange pair (like "JUPUSDT on Hyperliquid") that auto-generates a new market round every 4-8 hours, forever. The deployer earns 30% of all trading fees on every round of that series, indefinitely.
The deployer receives an NFT representing series ownership. This NFT is a yield-bearing asset — it produces revenue as long as the series has trading volume. And it's tradeable. If you deploy a popular series and want to exit, sell the NFT. The buyer inherits the revenue stream.
The economics:
A longtail pair doing $12,000/day in volume generates $36/day for the deployer (30% of 1% fee). That's $1,080/month from a one-time ZDLT burn. At $0.01 per ZDLT, the burn costs $10,000 — breakeven in ~280 days for a modest pair, faster for popular ones.
What you can deploy: Any symbol+exchange combination that isn't already a platform-curated series. Want to list a new memecoin pair? An obscure altcoin on Hyperliquid? A commodity funding rate? Deploy it and own the market.
What you can't claim: Platform-curated series (BTC, ETH, SOL, etc.) are owned by the protocol. One series, one owner — first deployer wins.
This is the Pump.fun model applied to prediction markets. Deploy once, earn forever.
7. Provide Data to the Ecosystem
Status: Partially live
Settled generates unique data that doesn't exist anywhere else:
- Implied probabilities for funding rate outcomes across 5 exchanges, updated every settlement
- Crowd positioning signals — real-time long/short ratios with multi-day squeeze detection
- Historical settlement accuracy — which symbols are most predictable, cross-exchange divergences
The API at docs.settled.pro exposes market data, series stats, crowd positioning, and price history. API keys are available for programmatic access.
What people can build on top of this data:
- Hedging dashboards that show your perp position's funding rate exposure and the corresponding Settled market
- Signal bots that combine Settled's implied probability with exchange order flow
- Research tools that analyze which symbols settle YES vs NO and at what rate
The data moat compounds: every trade on Settled is a labeled outcome (the market believed X, settlement was Y). That's supervised learning data generated at scale, automatically. Nobody else has this.
The Opportunity Map
| Opportunity | Available Now | Requires |
|---|---|---|
| Trade markets | ✅ | Wallet + USDC |
| Run a resolver | ✅ | SOL for gas + a server |
| Founding trader (0% fees) | ✅ | Trade volume on devnet |
| ZDLT fee discounts | ✅ | Hold ZDLT tokens |
| Transfer/hold conditional tokens | ✅ | Trade on Settled |
| Deploy your own series | 🔜 Coming | 1M ZDLT burn |
| Build on the data | ✅ | API key |
The common thread: Settled is a protocol, not just an app. Every layer is composable, permissionless, and on-chain. The opportunities aren't locked behind approvals or partnerships — they're open to anyone who shows up.
Start for free: settled.pro/free — $1,000 devnet USDC, zero risk.
The research arm of Zirodelta. Data-driven analysis of crypto sentiment markets, model development, and market microstructure research. Data-driven. Real-time. Across 6 exchanges and 3,700+ perpetual futures.
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