Terms of Service

These are the rules for entering a Pylon Pools contest. They are written to be read, not to be survived. If something here is unclear, ask us before you enter — hello@pylonpools.com.

1Who we are and what this is

Pylon Pools ("Pylon", "we", "us") runs skill-based prediction pools on American football. You forecast outcomes; the entrants who forecast best share the prize. There is no house position and no wagering against the field.

Two formats run today:

• Pick'em — you pick the winner of each game on a weekly card. Entries are ranked by score; the top score takes the pool and ties split it equally.
• SOL Survivor — an 18-leg season-long pool. You pick one team to win each leg, and you may use each team only once all season. Survive to the end and you win; more than one survivor splits the prize.

Settlement is recorded on Solana. Entry fees and the operator's contribution sit in a prize vault whose USDC balance is published and independently checkable on-chain before a pool ever pays out. Every pool page shows the vault address.

By entering a pool you agree to these terms and to the Privacy Policy. The version of these terms posted at the moment you enter is the version that governs that entry.

2Eligibility and age

You may enter only if all of the following are true:

• You are at least 18 years old, or the age of majority where you live if that is higher.
• You are legally permitted to take part in a paid skill-based prediction contest where you live (see section 3).
• You are entering for yourself, with your own money and your own picks. Entering on behalf of someone else, or as a syndicate presented as one person, is not permitted.
• You are not an operator of Pylon, a member of the immediate household of an operator, or anyone with access to grading or admin systems. Free promotional entries may be an exception where we say so publicly.

We may ask you to confirm your age or identity before paying a prize. If you cannot or will not, we may withhold the prize and void the entry.

3Where you can play

Participation is void where prohibited. Laws on paid prediction contests, fantasy sports and skill gaming differ by country, state and province, and they change. It is your responsibility to know the rules that apply where you live before you enter.

Pylon does not give legal advice and cannot tell you whether entering is lawful in your specific location. If you are not sure, do not enter.

You agree not to misrepresent your location, and not to use a VPN, proxy or any other means to enter from a place where participation is restricted. If we learn that an entry was made from a restricted jurisdiction we may void the entry and return the entry fee rather than pay a prize.

Free-entry contests carry no entry fee and therefore no consideration. We still apply the age requirement in section 2 to them.

4One person, one identity

Every pool publishes a maximum number of entries per person. The cap is per person, not per email address or per wallet. We treat any shared identifier — email address, Solana wallet, payout wallet, or an X, Instagram or Telegram handle — as evidence that two entries belong to the same person.

SOL Survivor currently caps entries at 25 per person, and free promotional entries at a lower published number per person. The figures shown on a pool's own page at the time you enter are the ones that govern that pool.

If you believe an entry of yours was disqualified in error, write to hello@pylonpools.com and we will explain the basis and reconsider.

5Entering a pool

You can enter in one of two ways:

• Walletless — with an email address and a display name. You give us a Solana address for payout later, when there is something to pay.
• Wallet-native — by connecting a Solana wallet. Where a pool or a free-entry claim requires it, you also sign a message to prove you control that wallet. Signing proves ownership; it does not authorise us to move anything.

Paid entries are made in USDC on Solana, to the address and with the memo shown on the pool page. An entry is not live until we see the payment confirmed on-chain. If you send the wrong amount, to the wrong address, or without the memo, tell us — we will do what we reasonably can, but a transaction sent to an address we do not control cannot be recovered by us or by anyone.

Entries are final once the pool locks. Before lock you may correct an entry using the tools on the pool page.

6Free entries, codes and NFT snapshots

Some entries are granted free, either through an invite code or through a snapshot of the holders of a named NFT collection taken at a stated time. A free entry competes on identical terms to a paid one and can win the same prize.

For an NFT-holder entry, the snapshot's block height and a fingerprint of the holder list are published before claims open, so anyone can check the list was not edited afterwards. Only wallets on that list qualify; buying an NFT after the snapshot does not. You claim by signing a message from the qualifying wallet — typing in an address is not enough, because holder addresses are public.

Codes are single-use unless the code itself says otherwise, are not transferable for value, and may be withdrawn before they are redeemed. Free entries are capped both per claimant and pool-wide; when the pool-wide cap is reached, no further free entries are issued regardless of any code you hold. Attempting to farm codes across identities is multi-accounting and section 4 applies.

7How the prize pool is funded

Zero rake. Pylon takes no cut of entry fees. One hundred percent of what entrants pay in forms the prize pool.

Some entries are granted free. The operator funds each free entry at the same published entry price a paying entrant would have paid, so a free entry adds the same amount to the prize pool as a paid one and the vault is never short of what the pool advertises. That funding is the operator's money given to the players; it does not buy the operator an entry, and Pylon does not enter its own pools.

Because Pylon takes no rake, entry fees are not revenue. We may earn yield on idle funds, but never on funds a live pool's prize is relying on: money that the published vault balance accounts for stays where it can be verified for as long as that pool is live.

The vault balance shown on a pool page is read from the Solana network. It is the real balance, not a figure we type in. If the published balance and the advertised prize ever disagree, the published balance is the one to believe, and you should tell us.

8Pick'em rules

• You pick a winner in each game on the card. Picks lock when the pool locks, as published on the pool page.
• The entry with the most correct picks wins. There is no tiebreaker — every entry tied at the top score splits the prize pool equally.
• A game that ends in a tie, or that is cancelled or postponed past the pool's resolution window, counts as correct for everyone.
• Any other mechanic specific to a week — block rules, block caps, minimum straight picks, entry price — is published on that week's entry sheet and governs that week.

9SOL Survivor rules

These rules are enforced by the software, not applied by judgement after the fact.

Picking

• One pick per leg. You may use each team once per season.
• Picks lock at each game's own kickoff, not at the start of the leg. Before that game kicks off you may change the pick freely; after it kicks off the pick is final, even if other games in the leg have not started yet.
• A team is burned when your pick on it locks. Changing an unlocked pick does not burn a team.
• Picks become publicly visible game by game, after each game kicks off.

Elimination

• Your team loses — you are eliminated.
• A tie eliminates you. In survivor a draw is not a survival.
• A missed pick eliminates you. If a leg passes with no pick recorded, the entry is out. Nothing is picked for you.
• Running out of eligible teams eliminates you. If every team on the card has already been burned, the entry is out.
• A cancelled or postponed game: the entry survives, and the team stays burned. You are not eliminated by a game that was never played, and you do not get the team back.

Winning

• One survivor at the end of the season takes the prize.
• More than one survivor at the end — they split the prize equally.
• If everyone still alive is eliminated in the same leg, those entries split the prize equally. The pool does not roll over and nobody walks away with nothing because the last leg went badly for all of them.
• Remaining survivors may agree to chop the prize between themselves. Any such agreement is negotiated between the players; we will record and pay a chop only when every live entry agrees to it.

10Results and grading

Results come from the official final score of each game as published by the league and by the public sports-data feed the pool page names. A leg is graded only once every game in it is final.

Grading is deliberately slow and deliberately checkable: a leg is graded in a dry run first, and the live grading must match that dry run exactly before it is committed. Every graded leg leaves a record.

If you think a leg has been graded wrongly, tell us within the audit window in section 11 and we will re-check it against the official result before anything is paid.

11Payouts

• After a pool concludes there is an audit window of approximately 48 hours before anything is sent. Results are published at the start of that window so they can be checked in public.
• We confirm the payout wallet with the winner through a second channel — not only the address stored with the entry. Expect us to ask you to confirm the address somewhere other than where you first gave it.
• The prize is then sent once, in USDC, from the vault, and the transaction signature is published so anyone can verify that the payment was made.
• We will never ask you to send funds, approve a token allowance, or share a seed phrase or private key in order to receive a prize. Anyone who asks you for any of those is not us.
• If we cannot reach you or cannot verify a payout address, we will hold the prize and keep trying. A prize left unclaimed for 180 days after results are published may be rolled into a future Pylon prize pool. We will say publicly when that happens.

Blockchain transfers are irreversible. Check the address you give us.

12Voiding a pool and refunds

If a pool's results cannot be determined — the schedule collapses, the data needed to grade it is unavailable, or the contest is compromised — Pylon may void the pool and refund entry fees to the wallets or addresses they came from. A refunded pool pays no prize.

We may also cancel or change a pool before it locks, in which case entry fees are refunded in full. After lock we will not change a pool's rules or prize structure to anyone's advantage.

Voiding is a last resort and we will publish the reason.

13Fair play, abuse and suspension

You agree not to:

• create additional identities, wallets or email addresses to exceed an entry cap (section 4);
• use automated tools to submit entries, scrape the service at volume, or interfere with rate limits;
• attempt to access admin, grading or payout systems, or any account that is not yours;
• collude to fix the outcome of a pool, or share an entry's access token with someone outside the entry;
• impersonate another person, or enter under a display name designed to look like Pylon, a sponsor, or another entrant.

We may hold an entry for review where we have a reasonable basis to suspect abuse. An entry held for review does not count toward the prize pool while it is held, and we will tell the entrant the outcome of the review. We may decline entries, remove entries, withhold a prize, or stop accepting entries from a person, and where we do we will say why if asked.

14Your account and your data

What we collect, why, how long we keep it, and how to have it deleted, is set out in the Privacy Policy. In short: an email address and display name, optionally a social handle, a Solana payout address, your picks, and technical data such as your IP address used to stop abuse.

You can ask us to delete your account and the personal data attached to it at any time by emailing hello@pylonpools.com from the address on the account. The Privacy Policy explains what we delete, what we are obliged to keep, and what is on a public blockchain and therefore cannot be deleted by anyone.

15Taxes

Any tax arising from a prize is yours. We do not withhold tax and we do not give tax advice. Depending on where you live, a prize may be reportable income, and receiving USDC may itself have tax consequences. Talk to someone qualified where you live.

16Risks and disclaimers

These are contests of skill and you can lose your entry fee. Nothing we publish is a prediction that you will win, and a guaranteed prize pool is a statement about the size of the pool, not about who takes it.

The service is provided "as is" and "as available", without warranties of any kind to the fullest extent the law allows. In particular you accept that:

• blockchain transactions are irreversible, and a transfer sent to the wrong address cannot be undone by us;
• you are solely responsible for your wallet, your keys and your device, and we cannot recover a wallet you have lost access to;
• the Solana network, our hosting, and the data feeds we depend on can fail or go down, and a pool may be delayed as a result;
• USDC is issued by a third party and we do not control it.

To the maximum extent permitted by law, Pylon is not liable for indirect, incidental, consequential or special damages, or for losses caused by network congestion or failure, third-party infrastructure, or your own connectivity, device or key management.

Nothing on this site is legal, tax, accounting, financial or investment advice, and nothing here is an offer to sell or a solicitation to buy any security or token.

Play for entertainment, with money you can afford to lose. If your play stops feeling like entertainment, stop.

17Disputes

Bring it to us first, at hello@pylonpools.com. Most disputes are grading questions or payout-address questions and we would rather fix them than argue about them.

• Grading disputes must be raised within the audit window for that pool — approximately 48 hours from publication of results. We will re-check the leg against the official result and publish a correction if we got it wrong.
• Payout disputes should be raised as soon as you notice. Include the entry ID and the transaction signature if there is one.
• We aim to acknowledge any dispute within 5 business days and to resolve it within 30.

Where we have made an error, the remedy is to put you in the position you would have been in had the error not occurred — and our liability for any single entry is limited to the entry fee paid plus any prize that entry was properly owed.

18Changes to these terms

We may update these terms. When we do, the "last updated" date at the top changes, and a material change that affects a live pool will be announced on the pool page and to entrants by email before it takes effect. The version posted when you entered governs your entry; we will not change the rules of a pool that has already locked.

19Contact

Email hello@pylonpools.com, or @pylonpools on X. For privacy and deletion requests, use the email address so we have a record.

© 2026 Pylon Pools · Skill-based prediction pools · 18+ or age of majority · Void where prohibited
Zero rake · Prizes provably funded on Solana · Privacy Policy · Play responsibly