According to @boldleonidas, a recent crypto trading competition awarded $1,000,000 to first place with negligible value for second, creating a winner-take-all payoff that incentivized participants to use extreme leverage (source: @boldleonidas, X, Nov 20, 2025). The author states this structure favors high-variance, liquidation-tolerant strategies over risk-adjusted performance, making leaderboard PnL a poor proxy for sustainable trading edge (source: @boldleonidas). For traders, the actionable takeaway is to treat contest outcomes cautiously and prioritize live-market discipline, position sizing, and drawdown control when allocating capital (source: @boldleonidas).