TL;DR - Team formats exist because teams recruit. A squad captain brings a community, the community brings volume, and the organizer pays the squad from the volume. Four designs cover almost every team event: mass squads with no size limit (Bybit's WSOT, where the largest 2022 squad had 3,241 members, and KuCoin's KuLeague, where 1,100 teams competed in 2026), qualified teams with a minimum size and volume (Bitget's KCGI 2025 required ten members and 30,000 USDT), small fixed teams (Bitget's UEX Futures League sends 16 teams of three to a live final), and sides, where entrants pick a country, a captain or even "Team Human" against "Team AI". Head-to-head duels are rarer and newer: BingX ran a 2,000,000 USDT 1v1 showdown in August 2026 that paired traders on the same instrument. The team's score is usually a sum, which means the biggest team wins the volume board and the best-run team wins the return board.
Most tournaments in this catalogue are solo: of 150 events, 21 are recorded as solo-only, five as open to teams and individuals, one as team-only, and the rest do not mention teams at all. The team events are where the biggest fields and the biggest community dynamics are, and their rules are different enough from solo play that a trader who joins one without reading the team clauses is playing a different game from the one they think. This piece covers the four team designs and the head-to-head format, with the 2025 and 2026 events as examples; the counting rules behind them are in how tournaments count volume, trades and P&L.
Why organizers want teams
A solo entrant brings one account. A squad captain who is also a streamer, a community leader or a regional influencer brings hundreds, and every one of them trades on the organizer's venue for the duration. Bybit built its World Series of Trading on this from the first edition in 2020, with 135 teams among 12,368 entrants, and by 2022 its largest squads had 3,241, 2,565 and 2,232 members, two of them captained by Korean streamers. Bitget's KCGI 2025 paid a Team Leader Award to the first 200 eligible teams on top of the prize pool. The team is a distribution channel with a leaderboard attached, and the formats below are different ways of pricing it.
Design 1: mass squads
No cap on size, join by link, the squad's score is the sum of its members. Bybit's WSOT is the reference: in 2025 the Squad Showdown carried $3.76 million of a $10 million pool, 1,474 squads formed, and the field reached 520,451 participants from 202 countries. KuCoin's KuLeague Fall 2026 ran a Team Battle on trading volume alongside a Solo Contest on return: 1,100 teams and 8,234 eligible participants, with the top three teams each at roughly 87 million USDT of volume from 348, 799 and 174 members, and a 100,000 USDT team pool split among the top 30.
In a sum-scored volume squad, size is strategy. A 799-member team and a 174-member team finished within four million USDT of each other, which says more about the 174 than the 799. Read whether the team score is a sum, an average or a top-N before deciding whether to join the biggest squad or the best one.
Design 2: qualified teams
A minimum size and a minimum combined activity to be eligible, then ranking on team totals. Bitget's KCGI 2025 required teams of at least ten members with 30,000 USDT of combined volume to qualify for a share of the $3 million Team Battle pool, ranked the top ten teams by P&L and the top ten by return, paid the top 100 individuals separately, and reserved 40% of the team pool for eight regional leaderboards. The field was 120,197 participants in 1,620 teams. KCGI 2026 went multi-asset, with more than 83,000 traders in 320 teams ranked on team P&L in its UEX Arena while separate boards tracked volume per market.
The qualification threshold changes the recruitment problem: a captain needs ten committed members, not a thousand casual ones, and a team ranked on return cannot be carried by size.
Design 3: small fixed teams
Three or four named members, invitation or qualification, often a live final. Bitget's UEX Futures League runs two online legs and invites the top eight teams from each to a final of 16 teams of three at an undisclosed venue with travel paid. WorldQuant's International Quant Championship fielded teams through its regional rounds until it switched its global final to individual competitors in 2025. Small-team formats are the closest trading has to a sports team: the members are known, the roster is fixed, and the result follows each name.
Design 4: sides
The entrant does not form a team; they pick one. WhiteBIT's Influence Trade Battle, run with TradingView from 26 May to 19 July 2026, asked traders to "choose the strongest team" of influencers and paid 400 or more prize spots across individual and team rewards. WEEX's AI Wars II (6 September to 9 October 2026, 600,000 USDT) split the field into Team Human and Team AI across five futures rounds, with a 100,000 USDT main pool shared by both sides every round and a separate elite award for Team AI. Goat Funded Trader's India vs Pakistan Traders Cup (10 to 16 August 2026) scored the two countries on which had more traders in the top 50, with $5,000 in cash and free evaluation accounts for the winning side. Zoomex's ZWTC 2026 and KuCoin's PROOF campaign run team and solo tracks in parallel.
Side formats are cheap for the entrant and good for the organizer's content calendar, and the individual still has to place on their own.
Head-to-head duels
The one-on-one format is the most watchable and, until 2026, almost absent from the catalogue. BingX ran a 1vs1 Showdown from 5 to 31 August 2026 with a 2,000,000 USDT pool across crypto, stocks, indices, forex and commodities: traders were matched into pairs and competed on the same instrument over the campaign window, with a ranking that blended P&L, return and volume across all matched trades. That is the duel as a tournament mechanic rather than as an exhibition, and it solves the format's usual problem, that a single match is statistically meaningless, by running many matches and ranking the aggregate.
Outside that event, duels appear as exhibition matches and stream formats, and simulator leagues have so far concentrated on timed multi-player tables. If the format spreads, expect it where the audience is: inside platforms with live video, which already have the leaderboard and the camera.
What to read before joining a team
Four clauses decide whether a team is worth joining: how the team score is computed (sum, average, top-N), whether there is a minimum size or combined activity to qualify, how the team prize is divided among members (equally, by contribution, or at the captain's discretion), and whether individual prizes exist alongside the team ones. The second and third are the ones that produce disputes, and they are the ones most often left to the organizer's final-interpretation clause. The competitions listing records the team option for each event; the formats explainer places team play among the other five axes.
Frequently asked questions
What is a team trading competition?
A tournament in which entrants compete as squads or teams and the team's combined result is ranked, usually alongside individual leaderboards. Formats range from mass squads with thousands of members (Bybit WSOT, KuCoin KuLeague) to qualified teams with a minimum size (Bitget KCGI) and small fixed teams of three (Bitget UEX Futures League).
How are team scores calculated in trading tournaments?
Most often as the sum of members' volume or P&L, sometimes as team return. KCGI 2025 ranked the top ten teams by P&L and by return; KuLeague ranked teams by total volume; the UEX Futures League pays a team return pool. The rules state which, and it decides whether size or skill wins.
Are there 1v1 trading competitions?
Rarely. BingX ran a 1vs1 Showdown in August 2026 with a 2,000,000 USDT pool, matching traders in pairs on the same instrument and ranking the aggregate of their matched trades. Most other head-to-head trading is exhibition or stream content rather than a ranked event.
How big do trading squads get?
The largest squads in Bybit's WSOT 2022 had 3,241, 2,565 and 2,232 members. WSOT 2025 formed 1,474 squads among 520,451 participants; KuLeague Fall 2026 had 1,100 teams.
Related
- How tournaments count volume, trades and P&L for the team-total arithmetic.
- Trading tournament formats explained for the other five axes.
- Live trading finals for the UEX final and other stage formats.
- Bybit World Series of Trading guide for the largest squad event.
Sources: Bybit WSOT 2025 recap, Bitget KCGI 2025 wrap-up, Bitget UEX Futures League; KuLeague, WEEX, WhiteBIT, Goat Funded Trader and BingX event details are from the organizers' announcements as catalogued.
Last reviewed 2026-10-20 by the trading-tournaments.com editorial team. Corrections via the Suggest a change form.