Hives & copy-trading

Hives

A hive is a captain's following. Every hive is bound to one venue — Polymarket or Kalshi — chosen by the captain when the hive is created, and you need your own account at that venue to back it (see Venues). When you join one, you set two numbers:

• Per-call budget — how much to put behind a single call at full conviction.
• Total allocation — the ceiling on how much of your money can be at work in this hive at once. Funds up to this amount are reserved as your copy budget while your allocation is live, and released when you stop. On a Polymarket hive the reserve is held against your deposit-wallet balance; on a Kalshi hive it is a budget HiveTrade tracks, and each copied order is also capped by the cash in your Kalshi account.

You can be active (copying new calls) or paused (still reserved, not copying) — both hold your budget. Cancelling stops new copies and releases the unused budget; to come back you simply allocate again.

How a call becomes your position

When a captain publishes a call on a market at the hive's venue, they set a conviction — an integer from 1% to 100%. Your stake on that call is:

your stake = per-call budget × conviction%

capped at whatever allocation you have remaining. So a $20 per-call budget at 75% conviction stakes $15 — unless you only have $10 of allocation left, in which case it stakes $10. Each account receives its own venue execution. Fill prices and quantities can differ as the order book changes; an order can partly fill or not fill at all. When the sizing path applies a liquidity cap, requested sizes are reduced proportionally before orders are submitted. On Kalshi, orders are placed in whole contracts, so your copied size is expressed in contracts at the real filled price.

The order is placed in your own venue account: on Polymarket from your deposit wallet using Polymarket's CLOB, on Kalshi in your Kalshi account using the trade-only key you connected.

When the market resolves

The venue resolves the market and pays out in your own account. On Polymarket a HiveTrade watcher redeems the winning position into your deposit wallet; on Kalshi the exchange credits your cash automatically. Either way, your allocation is updated:

• Win — your full payout is credited back to your allocation, and the profit is added to your P&L.
• Loss — the stake was already placed when the call fired, so nothing more is taken; your P&L reflects the loss.
• Cancelled/void — the remaining principal is refunded. Any profit or loss already realized by an earlier partial sale remains in your history.

You're not locked in

Pausing keeps your budget reserved but stops new copies. Cancelling releases the unused budget. Open positions still need to close or settle; cancelling an allocation does not sell them.