Top Tick

The rules, exactly

A tape

A tape is a real 60-hour stretch of trading in one perpetual market on Hyperliquid: 240 fifteen-minute candles, replayed in 12 seconds (20 candles a second, so one second of tape is five hours of market). Prices are rebased so the first candle opens at 100. The market and the dates stay hidden until the tape ends.

Your trade

• You buy at the open of the first candle, at 100.
• One tap sells, at the close of the candle on screen when you tap. The button, the chart, Space and Enter all sell.
• No tap: you sell at the close of the last candle.
• After you sell the rest of the tape plays out faster, so you see what you left or what you avoided.

The score

best exit = the highest close of the 240 candles
score = (your exit − 100) ÷ (best exit − 100) × 100, rounded to a whole percent

• Selling at the best close scores 100%.
• An exit at or below 100, break-even or a loss, scores 0%. There are no negative scores.
• The day score is the average of the five tape scores, rounded.
• Squares: 🟩 70% or more, 🟨 30% to 69%, 🟥 under 30%.

The label

"Lost" is counted in missed points: 100 minus the tape's score. The missed points of tapes sold before the best candle are added up, and so are those of tapes sold after it.

Which markets

Twenty markets: the perpetual markets with the largest traded volume over 24 hours on Hyperliquid, read at the moment the day's tapes are made (usually the day before they are played). Only the exchange's own crypto perpetuals are used. Left out: the separately deployed markets for stocks, commodities and pre-IPO companies, delisted markets, and PAXG, whose token is pegged to gold. The list is read again every day, and names are written as the exchange writes them (kPEPE is 1,000 PEPE).

Today's twenty appear here once today's tapes have loaded.

Which windows

Each day's five tapes are picked by a draw seeded from the date and a secret kept on the server, so everyone gets the same five and nobody can work out tomorrow's. Five different markets a day, and no two of a day's tapes overlap in time. A window starts at 00, 04, 08, 12, 16 or 20 UTC, begins no more than 49 days and ends at least 3 days before the day it is played, and is used only if all of this holds:

• all 240 fifteen-minute candles exist, with no gap;
• its range, highest high minus lowest low, is at least 8% of the starting price (flatter windows are rejected);
• its best exit is at least 3% above the starting price, so there is always a gain to catch;
• its best exit falls in the quarter of the tape (first, second, third or fourth 15 hours) that the draw picked for that tape beforehand. Each quarter is equally likely, so the top comes early as often as late and neither always holding nor always selling fast wins.

A window that overlaps one the same market showed in the previous seven days is not drawn again. If a round of the twenty markets cannot fill five tapes under every rule, which takes a very calm seven weeks, the quarter rule is dropped for the tapes still missing, and after another round the two spacing rules. The 240-candle, 8% and 3% rules always hold.

Why seven weeks and 15-minute candles: the source keeps about the latest 5,000 candles of each size. For 1-minute candles that is under four days, too little to draw from; for 15-minute candles it is about 52 days. Because of the 8% rule the tapes are the livelier stretches of those weeks, not average ones.

Where the candles come from

Hyperliquid's public market data: the prices of its perpetual contracts, which can differ from spot prices elsewhere. Top Tick is not affiliated with Hyperliquid. There is no second source: if it cannot be reached when a day is made, there are no tapes until it answers. Each tape names its market and dates when it is revealed.

What counts

• The first run per browser counts. Results are kept in this browser's storage; nothing is tied to an account, because there are none.
• Leaving or reloading in the middle of a tape counts as never selling: out at the last candle.
• The crowd's median is the middle day score of the runs reported today. A run is reported once, when a browser finishes its fifth tape; the server works out the score itself from the five exits. Two runs finishing in the same instant can be counted as one, so the count is a floor.
• There are no prizes. Someone who plays a second time in another browser already knows the tops; their score proves nothing, and nothing depends on it.

No wallet, no account, no sign-up. Sound is off unless you turn it on.

The token: Top Tick ($TOPTICK)

The game is free and needs no wallet. Holding the token changes nothing in the game.

Treasury wallet

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