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Your funded account has had a good run. You close everything, you are flat, and your payable share is more than $800. You hit withdraw.
Two things happen. You are paid $800 today. The rest is not refused, and it is not left in the account where a bad trade could take it. It becomes a pending claim.
Two caps, both set by the reserve
| Cap | Setting | At the $25,000 seed | What it paces |
|---|---|---|---|
| Per-user daily cap | 4% of deployable reserve, or your remaining lifetime limit if lower | $800 | How fast one trader is paid |
| Global daily cap | 20% of deployable reserve | $4,000 | How many traders exit on the same day |
The per-user cap is one fifth of the global cap. It is set by the reserve, not by account size, so it is the same whichever account you hold. When either cap truncates a payout, the treatment is identical.
What happens to the remainder
- The cap is paid today.
- Your balance still returns fully to the starting balance.
- The unpaid remainder becomes a pending claim, held outside the trading balance.
- It settles on the following days, at up to the cap, until it is exhausted.
The paper's own example: on a $25,000 account a full profit cycle pays $2,000, which is $25,000 x 10% x 80%. At $800 a day it clears in three days: $800, $800, then $400. On a $10,000 account a full cycle is $800 and clears in one.
A pending claim cannot be traded, cannot be lost to a later breach, and does not move your drawdown floor. Taking profit cannot hurt your trading day either. The full reduction in balance is added back to that day's loss budget, not only the amount settled that day, so the return to starting balance can never itself trigger the daily loss limit.
Who is paid first
Pending claims settle in the order they were created, and before any new request. If book-level pacing under the global cap leaves you short today, you are paid first the next day.
This matters on the days when many funded traders want out at once. The global cap spreads those exits across days. The ordering means a trader who is waiting is never overtaken by one who asked later.
What survives a breach or completion
A pending claim is a debt, not profit standing in the account. It crystallised when you were flat and eligible, and it left the trading balance before any later breach.
- If the account breaches, it is disabled and nothing more is paid from the balance. The pending claim is still paid in full. It is the one exception to the breach rule.
- If the account completes, the claim survives and settles on the normal schedule.
- Against the lifetime limit, a claim counts when it is created, not when it settles. The limit is 20% of the deployable reserve at the moment the account is funded, $4,000 at the recommended $25,000 seed. A request that would pass the remaining limit is paid up to it, and the account then completes.
Your remaining lifetime limit and any pending claim must be visible in the account at all times.
Caps pace payment, they never reduce it
A daily cap is a throughput control, not a solvency control. It changes when you are paid, not what you are owed, and the unpaid balance stays a liability on Dega's book until it settles. The paper is blunt about the alternative: a firm using caps to manage solvency has already failed and is concealing it. Dega's solvency control is the admission gate, which binds before the reserve is short and stops new sales and new funded activations without touching payouts already earned.
Payouts are paid in USDG on Robinhood Chain and settled by smart contract, with no discretionary approval in between. The one condition that can withhold a payout is where sanctions or restricted-jurisdiction rules require it. Separately, proven prohibited conduct closes an account without payout. Your account stays simulated throughout: orders never reach Lighter's order book, and the balance is not your money. The claim is what you are owed.
Nothing has launched. Every figure in this post is a design figure from the Dega yellow paper, version 2.0, dated 22 September 2026. Dega is not an exchange, broker, custodian or investment manager. Accounts are simulated: orders do not reach Lighter's order book, and the account balance is not your money. Dega's hedge positions are Dega's own, never yours. Payouts are subject to a lifetime limit of 20% of the publicly visible reserve and a per-user cap of $800 a day.
