Numerai Round Cadence: Daily and Weekly Tournaments

Timing data across 1,064 tournament-8 rounds shows weekly and daily rounds both settle after about a month, while weekly rounds have a wider payout distribution.

Numerai's Classic tournament now runs two parallel cadences: weekly rounds anchored to Saturday opens, and daily rounds that fire Tuesday through Friday. Across 1,064 resolved tournament-8 rounds in the rounds list, the median round takes about 33 days from open to final resolve. The 95th-percentile weekly round paid out 15,326 NMR versus 2,329 NMR for the equivalent daily — a 6.6× gap that means the round-type tag matters more for headline payout numbers than any other field on the round.

This post pins down the actual clock: when rounds open, how long stakers have to submit, when scoring lands, and when the protocol releases the payout. Every number below comes from rounds.open_time, close_time, and round_resolve_time joined back to is_daily and round_resolved for tournament 8.

When Rounds Open

The cadence flipped in late 2022. Before October 2022 there was a single weekly round per week; after the daily stream launched, Classic began producing three to four times as many rounds per month as the weekly stream alone.

Stacked bar chart of monthly Numerai rounds opened, with daily rounds dominating from late 2022 onward and weekly rounds holding steady at 4-5 per month
Stacked bar chart of monthly Numerai rounds opened, with daily rounds dominating from late 2022 onward and weekly rounds holding steady at 4-5 per month

Daily rounds opened on October 25, 2022 (round 340) and have run continuously since. A typical recent month sees four or five weekly rounds plus 15-19 daily rounds, roughly 20 fresh rounds per month for the Classic tournament alone. Every weekly round opens on Saturday. Daily rounds open Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday at roughly 12:00 UTC, skipping Saturday through Monday so they don't collide with the weekly cycle.

The submission window also differs. Weekly rounds give stakers a median of 3.1 days between open and close (with the longest week-long windows in early rounds). Daily rounds give exactly one day: the median open-to-close gap is 1.00 days with a tight 0.91-1.09 day band.

Resolution Lag

The lag from close to final resolve is the long, slow part of the round.

Histogram of days between round close and round resolve, with weekly rounds split between a 25-26 day cluster and a 30-day cluster, and daily rounds clustering at 30-32 days
Histogram of days between round close and round resolve, with weekly rounds split between a 25-26 day cluster and a 30-day cluster, and daily rounds clustering at 30-32 days

Weekly rounds resolve a median of 30.1 days after close (5th percentile 25.1 days, 95th percentile 30.3 days). The early weekly rounds settled in 25-26 days, and the lag widened to 30 days as the scoring window standardized. Daily rounds resolve a median of 30.3 days after close, with a 95th-percentile tail out to 32.3 days. The reason is structural: scoring uses roughly 20 business days of forward stock returns, so the soonest a round can settle is about a calendar month after submissions close.

Total round lifecycle (open to resolve) lands at about 33 days for both types: 32.8 days mean for weekly, 32.3 days mean for daily. A newly opened round typically will not finish paying out for about 33 days. The visible "current round" on the trends page is therefore always weeks ahead of the most recent resolved round.

Payout Magnitude

Per-round payouts split sharply by type.

Boxplot on log scale comparing total NMR paid out per round, showing weekly round medians near 920 NMR and daily round medians near 583 NMR with much tighter daily distribution
Boxplot on log scale comparing total NMR paid out per round, showing weekly round medians near 920 NMR and daily round medians near 583 NMR with much tighter daily distribution

Median weekly round pays out 920 NMR. Median daily round pays out 583 NMR. The 95th-percentile weekly round hits 15,326 NMR while the 95th-percentile daily round caps at 2,329 NMR, a 6.6x ratio at the top of the distribution. Lifetime, the 349 resolved weekly rounds have moved 920K NMR through the payout system; the 715 resolved daily rounds have moved 468K NMR. The difference is exposure duration: weekly rounds keep the same stake tied to a longer submission window, so weekly payout totals have a fatter upper tail.

The largest single weekly payout was 33,560 NMR; the largest daily was 4,893 NMR. Big absolute earnings are still a weekly-round phenomenon. See Round Economics for how earned and burned NMR flow inside those payouts.

Stake Tracking the Same Curve

Despite the cadence and payout differences, the total at stake per round tracks almost the same curve for both types.

Line chart of total NMR at stake per round over time, with weekly and daily series tracking the same growth curve and converging near 700K NMR
Line chart of total NMR at stake per round over time, with weekly and daily series tracking the same growth curve and converging near 700K NMR

Both series climb together from the daily-round launch in October 2022 and sat in the 600K-750K NMR range in the recent snapshot. Over the last 90 days in the dataset, the average weekly round held 690,957 NMR at stake versus 677,302 NMR for daily rounds, a 2% gap. The convergence makes sense: most stakers commit a single bond that auto-participates in every round their model is registered for. Every fresh round inherits roughly the same pool of at-risk NMR.

Where they diverge is the maximum. Weekly stake peaked at 970,886 NMR in March 2023 (round 449), shortly before the meta-model adjustments covered in The Meta Model. Daily stake peaked at 777,033 NMR in August 2025. The weekly peak predates the equilibrium daily rounds reached after their first full year.

Reading the Calendar

A practical mental model for the rounds list: every Saturday a weekly round opens and stays open for two to three days; every Tuesday-Friday a daily round opens and closes within 24 hours. A new submission will not be fully resolved for about 33 days, which is why pending payouts on the leaderboard lag the live submission tally by roughly a month.

Two operational implications follow. First, "current round" usually means the newest open round, not the newest settled round. There are typically 22-23 unresolved rounds in flight on the Classic tournament, because each round takes a month to settle. Second, the headline payout of an individual round number is misleading without the type tag: a 4,500 NMR round is enormous if it's daily and unremarkable if it's weekly. Filter by is_daily before comparing payouts, or use the per-staker views on the models page, which already normalize for round type.