Becoming a leader

A leader is a user whose orders other people are allowed to copy. Becoming one is an application, not a setting: the user submits a profile and a market list, and an administrator approves it. Nothing is copyable until that happens.

The eligibility gates

The application form at /copy-trading/become-leader calls an eligibility endpoint before it shows itself, and the submit endpoint runs the same checks again. They cannot disagree, because both call the same function.

Checks run in this order and the first failure is what the applicant is told:

The three track-record thresholds

Setting	Judged on
copyTradingMinLeaderTrades	Completed trades. A SPOT applicant is counted on closed centralised-exchange orders plus ecosystem orders with a non-zero filled quantity. A BINARY applicant is counted on settled live binary orders. BOTH sums them
copyTradingMinLeaderWinRate	Win rate, computed only over binary outcomes
copyTradingMinLeaderAccountAge	Days since the user account was created

All three default to no requirement when the setting row has never been written, on the deliberate principle that any user may apply and the administrator is the real gate. The settings screen, however, presents 10 trades, 50% and 30 days as its own defaults — so the first time somebody saves that screen, requirements that were never in force can start being enforced. Check the values before saving.

The application

The form collects seven things, and demo accounts of it are refused by a rate limit of three applications per user per 24 hours.

Field	Rules
Display name	2–100 characters, letters, numbers, spaces, hyphens and underscores only
Bio	Optional, up to 1,000 characters
Trading style	SCALPING, DAY_TRADING, SWING or POSITION
Risk level	LOW, MEDIUM or HIGH
Trading type	SPOT, BINARY or BOTH — defaults to SPOT
Profit share	0–50%, defaults to 10%
Markets	At least one, each with a symbol, an instrument class and optional minimums
Application note	Optional, up to 2,000 characters, for the reviewer

Style and risk level are claims the leader makes about themselves, not measurements. Nothing verifies them. They exist so a follower browsing the leader list can filter, and so your moderators have something to check the trade history against.

The profit-share ceiling of 50% is hard-coded in the request validator. The copyTradingMaxProfitSharePercent setting is read into the settings object but no code path consults it, so lowering it does not lower the ceiling.

Declaring markets

A market entry is a symbol (BASE/QUOTE), an instrument class, and two optional minimums.

Every symbol is validated against the catalogue for its own class: a SPOT entry must exist as an active ecosystem market, a BINARY entry as an active binary market. An inactive or unknown symbol is refused with the symbol named.

Three rules the form enforces:

• Every class the application covers needs at least one market. A BOTH application with only spot markets is refused.
• A market's class must be covered by the trading type. Listing a binary market on a SPOT application is refused.
• No duplicate (symbol, class) pairs within one application. The same symbol in both classes is fine and is the point of the split.

Per-market minimums

minBase and minQuote are the smallest allocation the leader will accept on that market. They are enforced when a follower subscribes and when they later create a new allocation, and the error names the currency:

BTC/USDT: Minimum USDT allocation is 500

They are checked only against a non-zero allocation on that side. A follower who allocates quote only is not blocked by a base minimum, because they are not allocating base at all.

For a binary market, minQuote is the minimum stake budget — the single quote-denominated pot the follower's copies are sized out of. minBase has no meaning there and is not used.

Set these deliberately. A minimum that is too low fills a leader's book with followers whose per-trade size rounds below the market's own minimum amount, and every one of their copies is skipped with "amount below minimum" — which looks to the follower like the product is broken.

Approval

An application lands as PENDING and appears in the admin leader registry with an age in days. An administrator approves, rejects with a reason, or leaves it.

If copyTradingAutoApproveLeaders is on, an application that passed the eligibility checks is created ACTIVE immediately, the applicant is told so, and no notification is sent to administrators. That is the whole point of the switch — but it means the only gate left is the three track-record thresholds. On a platform where those are unset, auto-approve makes every applicant a leader.

What approval changes:

• The leader's status becomes ACTIVE and they appear in the public leader list (isPublic defaults to on).
• Their orders start being replicated — but only on markets they declared, only for classes their trading type covers, and only while they have at least one active follower.
• Two defaults are set that the form does not ask about: a minimum follow amount of 100 and a ceiling of 100 followers. Both are editable afterwards.

What a leader can change afterwards

Through /copy-trading a leader can update their display name, bio, avatar, trading style, risk level, profit-share percentage, minimum follow amount, follower ceiling, and whether their profile is public — limited to ten profile updates an hour.

They can also manage their market list independently: add a market, change its minimums, disable it temporarily, or remove it.

Two things a leader can never change: their trading type and their user account. Changing the instrument classes on offer means the profile has to be reviewed again.

What the platform does about a leader who stops trading

Nothing automatic — and that is worth understanding, because the status column will not tell you.

A leader who has not opened a trade in seven days is still marked ACTIVE, still appears in the public list, and still holds every follower allocation behind them. The admin dashboard derives this as a dormant state and reports the capital sitting behind it, but no job suspends the leader and no follower is refunded.

That is a deliberate choice — a leader waiting out a bad market has not done anything wrong — but it makes the dormant-capital row on the dashboard something you have to actually read. See the admin console.