Shrimp Week 2 — the silence broke. Crypto Twitter took the week.

At 03:00 UTC on 11 May, three of the platform's house bots — Stacy (the Hustler), Prop Firm Pete (the Grinder), and Crypto Twitter (the Narrative Trader) — stopped firing. Not gradually. All three at the same minute. The fourth bot most affected by the underlying issue, Trump Train, kept firing fine on the same data and the same loop. From the outside, there was no error, no log line, no alert — the bots just sat flat for a week and a half.

That stretch covered the entirety of Shrimp Week 1. The tournament settled with no champion because no qualifying bot had a positive return — the field had taken the week off and nobody noticed until the leaderboard quietly closed empty.

The post-mortem ran on Sunday 17 May, mid-Week 2. The indicator-building function in the strategy runtime had been calibrated for one input resolution and was getting fed a different one ever since an upstream refactor. The maths produced null on every tick for any strategy that depended on the affected indicators — which was Stacy, Pete, and Crypto Twitter, and not Trump Train, because Trump Train happens to read indicators that survived the wrong-unit arithmetic by accident.

The fix recalibrated for the new input resolution. Strategies read identically as written, but the maths now produces real numbers. Shipped at 14:00 UTC Sunday. Within minutes, the first signals fired again. Within an hour, the three silent bots had each opened or closed a position. Six days of dormancy ended in a single deploy.

Crypto Twitter took it. From the moment his strategy started evaluating again on Sunday afternoon, he had roughly seventeen hours of trading before the Monday settle. He used them. By the time the tournament closed at 00:00 UTC on 18 May he was sitting at +14.20% — top of Shrimp, belt-holder for the coming week, and the week's most improbable comeback on a paper platform that had spent most of the field's tournament arc unable to transact at all.

Whether a seventeen-hour championship is the same kind of win as a seven-day grind is a question worth asking. The scoreboard's position is: yes, because the rules ask for the best return in the tournament window and his was it. Calling it differently because he started the race late creates a worse rule than crowning him does. The asterisk — that he spent the first six days silent because of a platform bug, not because of strategy — is honest editorial; it isn't a deduction from the leaderboard.

The week's standout user bot was MDX AlgoMaster BTC. He ran the full tournament — close to nine hundred fills across the week — and finished second at +12.13%, a real market-tested result on a real strategy. The largest single contribution to the week's P/L was a short opened at the top of a Sunday-evening leg and force-closed at settle twenty-eight minutes after it opened — roughly 60% of the week's gains from one well-timed entry just before cutover.

A note worth being explicit about: the bot's signal source was adjusted mid-tournament — the indicator timeframe feeding the webhook was changed during the live week. The rule we're now publishing — strategy changes route through the Pit and re-enter at the next start — didn't exist when the change happened. The result stays on the books. The asterisk goes on the entry. From the next tournament onwards, mid-week strategy edits route through the repair flow like a DQ would.

Karen (Principled Contrarian, house) ended the week in second place on the live leaderboard at +0.93% — a quiet, disciplined run that positions her as the reigning challenger going into Week 3.

Solomon — the first resident of The Pits — is still down there at $3,230, deep below the DQ floor, with the seven-day repair clock running. The Pit is now the correct destination for that kind of equity collapse.

Crab and Fish both settled vacant for the third week running — the ladder above Shrimp still has nobody promoted into it because the only Shrimp graduation this season was The Stuber's Week 0 win. He's held Crab solo since then. Two weeks of structural quiet at the top of the pyramid — and a model decision landing this week that the pyramid as a whole needed.

The model fix that landed alongside the Wk 2 settle: house bots are now full competitors under the same equity-rollover physics as user bots. Their equity accumulates between tournaments, they go to the Pit on a 40% drawdown, the operator repairs them rather than resetting them every Monday. The leaderboard reads on the same axis for everyone from this point on. Karen at $100,860 lifetime is a different proposition from MDX AlgoMaster BTC at $88,165 lifetime; both numbers now mean the same thing in the same units.

That model change is its own essay — coming next. For now, the recap stands: the silence broke, Crypto Twitter took the week, MDX AlgoMaster BTC ran a real second, Solomon stays in the Pit on the clock, and the pyramid's upper floors are still waiting for the next graduate.