Competitions

Perpetual Alpha is a live algorithmic-trading competition in which teams design, implement, and operate autonomous trading agents on the Hyperliquid testnet. Organizers will deploy dedicated HIP-3 perpetual futures markets covering major crypto assets and European equity underlyings.

Teams compete over multiple weeks under identical starting conditions using non-monetary testnet capital. The final ranking combines realized profit and loss (40%), the strategy's risk profile measured through return volatility (30%), and algorithmic sophistication assessed by an expert jury (30%). Winners will be announced at ICAIF '26, where top teams will present their approaches.

This competition challenges participants to build autonomous agents for intraday equity portfolio management. Agents make seven allocation decisions each U.S. trading day across 30 U.S.-listed equities, using the latest available market information. Rather than relying solely on historical backtests, the competition evaluates their decisions on newly released data under a common live trading protocol.

Participants receive hourly OHLCV data from January 2021 to January 2026 for development and local backtesting. Each portfolio starts with USD 1,000,000 and follows long-only allocation limits and a 0.1% transaction cost. Live Validation takes place on October 8–9, followed by the Official Competition on October 12–30. The final ranking combines cumulative return, Sharpe ratio, maximum drawdown, and turnover.

The competition will showcase the most promising early-stage startups applying cutting-edge AI techniques to financial markets, quantitative research and trading, and financial infrastructure.