HyperPNL: our own $42 purchase left no on-chain trace of the firm — observed 9 September 2026

Before (hyperpnl.com homepage + hyperpnl.gitbook.io/docs (architecture and payouts sections), read 5 September 2026): The homepage sells the model as fully inspectable — "Everyone can see everything on-chain" — and the GitBook docs name three contracts through which money is said to move: a Payment Router that splits each purchase, a Payout Treasury that receives the trader-payout share, and a Data Recorder that anchors results. No address is published for any of the three, on the site, in the docs, in the Terms of Use or in the application's JavaScript bundle. After (our own paid account on app.hyperpnl.com (login required) reconciled against a public Arbitrum RPC and the RelayDepository contract bytecode, read 9 September 2026): On 9 September 2026 we bought a 1-Step Flex $5,000 evaluation for $42, funded it in USDC on Arbitrum, and traced the payment end to end against a public Arbitrum RPC. One on-chain event: the deposit landed on the account the application had given us and was forwarded, 38 seconds later, into 0x4cd00e38…38bc31 — a contract whose own bytecode carries the string RelayDepository, the deposit contract of the third-party bridging protocol Relay, which over 200,000 blocks received 13,477,996.68 USDC from 2,003 transfers and swept 13,477,514.55 USDC out to a single external relayer address. That is shared bridging infrastructure, not a HyperPNL contract. The account then made no further outbound transfer and holds nothing, while the application's internal balance fell from 42.82 to 0.82 USDC at the moment the challenge was bought: the $42 was debited off-chain, in HyperPNL's own ledger. For the purchase we can follow from end to end there is no Payment Router transaction, no allocation to a Payout Treasury, no protocol-revenue split and no referral fee. The one field in the interface that resembles an on-chain record, labelled Tier, resolves to neither an Arbitrum transaction nor a block when queried by RPC. We are not saying the three contracts do not exist; we are saying that a buyer who wanted to check the on-chain promise has nothing to look at. What it changes: Buying a HyperPNL evaluation puts your fee into a third-party bridge and then into an internal ledger. Nothing about the purchase, the split or the reserve can be verified by a third party, which is the opposite of what the homepage advertises. We score that where it belongs: as a disclosure failure under the rules criterion, and NOT against payouts. The purchase rail is not the payout rail — that a $42 fee settled off-chain establishes nothing about how a withdrawal would be paid — so the payouts sub-score did not move at all on the day the desk-research cap was lifted, and it stays at 60 until we request a withdrawal and have something to measure. An earlier version of that day's revision did cut it to 45 on this trace alone; the objection was raised and accepted the same day, and the sub-score was restored. The honest comparison, since we have been asked for one: at Propr and at Hypernova we have been paid and have reconciled the money on-chain — Hypernova's 80% split to the cent on Arbitrum, and Propr's Payout Distributor a verified contract on Ethereum with published source. At HyperPNL we have not requested a withdrawal at all, and no address is published for any of the three contracts. No payout of ours has been tested — the account is in Phase 1 and negative — so the 80% split and the "instant" claim remain untested rather than disproved.