The Numerai Payout Factor Now Depends on Where You Stake

The same score on the same stake now pays out at three very different rates depending on which Numerai tournament it lands in. As of July 2026 the smoothed payout factor sits near 0.09 in Classic, 0.45 in Signals, and 1.0 in Crypto: a 10× spread in how much of your nominal exposure actually moves per round. When I compared the tournaments in April, the choice was mostly about which data pipeline you could operate. Three months later the more interesting question is what a marginal staked NMR is multiplied by, and the answer is being redrawn in real time by Numerai's new staking system.

A 10× map, drawn by the thermostat

The payout factor is Numerai's capacity thermostat: each round pays from a bounded budget, so the more NMR at risk, the smaller the multiplier applied to everyone's earn and burn. Classic, with about 733K NMR staked against a per-round budget of roughly 70K as of July 2026, runs near 0.095. Signals' smaller pool earns a 0.45 multiplier on an implied budget near 34K. Crypto is uncapped at 1.0, though for a reason that deserves its own section below.

Classic's line is the tournament's capacity history in one stroke: pinned at 1.0 through May 2021, then ratcheting down as stake grew, with a sharp step in mid-2023 when daily rounds became payable and the same budget was suddenly split across five times as many rounds. It has now held between 0.09 and 0.16 for three years. I read that stability as the thermostat working exactly as designed, and as a permanent feature rather than a phase: Classic stake would have to fall by half to move the dial meaningfully.

Signals grew into its payout factor

Signals is the live demonstration of what happens when capital chases a high multiplier. Its stake roughly tripled from the 2024 base to a peak of 172K NMR in mid-2025, and the payout factor gave most of the difference back, falling from 1.0 to a trough near 0.21 before recovering as stake came off the highs.

The realized economics moved the same way: Signals' mean net payout per round fell from 93 bps of stake in 2024 to 63 in 2025 and 38 so far in 2026. That is still four times Classic's yield, but the direction is unambiguous: the arbitrage is being competed away round by round, exactly as the thermostat design intends.

The violent dislocation in September 2025, when Signals' at-risk stake briefly collapsed from ~140K to ~27K and the factor spiked back to 1.0, is worth a flag of its own. These are thin pools, and a handful of large decisions can move the whole regime inside a month.

A higher multiplier is leverage, not yield

The temptation is to read the 0.09 / 0.45 / 1.0 map as a menu of expected returns. The realized numbers say otherwise.

Crypto printed a spectacular 195 bps per round in 2024 at full multiplier, then 16 in 2025 and 14 this year, and since 2025 it has carried the highest share of net-burn rounds of the three: one round in five.

The multiplier amplifies whatever the pool's edge is, in both directions, and Crypto's edge did not survive its own growth. Classic sits at the other extreme: its single-digit yield is mostly the 0.095 factor doing the compressing, the mechanism the alpha-decay deep dive measured from the model side. The practical read is that the payout factor tells you how fast your outcome — good or bad — compounds, while only pool-level edge tells you its sign. Signals has recently offered both, which is why its 38 bps still leads the board.

v3 staking is about to redraw the map

The July 2026 Crypto line needs a footnote that doubles as a forecast. Crypto's at-risk stake collapsed 95%, from ~49K NMR in rounds staked through May to ~2.5K in July, because Numerai is migrating staking to its new atomic blockchain staking system, and Crypto is the pilot. Stakers still held roughly 63K NMR against Crypto models on July 20 with almost none of it at risk, which is why the factor snapped back to 1.0. Classic and Signals are scheduled to follow, and the roadmap includes a USDC staking option explicitly priced at a lower payout factor.

That last detail is the one I would watch. A two-currency system with two payout factors makes the thermostat a pricing instrument rather than a single dial, and every historical relationship in this post — budget, factor, realized yield — will need re-basing once Classic migrates. Until then, Signals' 0.45 is the only high multiplier attached to a functioning pool as of July 2026, and its own history shows the discount shrinks as capital notices.

Method notes: rounds table for tournaments 8, 11 and 12 as of the 2026-07-20 ingest; payout-factor paths are 15-round rolling medians over payable rounds (factor > 0), so the unpayable early daily rounds of 2022–23 are excluded. Signals rounds report a payout factor from 2024 onward. Realized yields are means of per-round (earned − burned) / at-stake over resolved rounds only; 2026 covers rounds resolved to date (n = 120 Classic, 80 Signals, 120 Crypto), and Signals/Crypto means are volatile at these pool sizes. Implied budget = factor × stake, which approximates the true at-risk denominator.