Selling a strategy in the marketplace — what the buyer actually receives

The usual way to sell an Expert Advisor is to ship a compiled .ex4 or .ex5 and hope the buyer trusts it. They cannot read it, cannot adjust anything you did not expose as an input, and cannot learn anything from it.

The TradeSmithy marketplace sells the strategy instead: the buyer gets the graph copied into their own projects, fully editable. That changes what a listing has to protect and what a sale has to guarantee, so both are worth explaining.

What transfers on a sale

When someone buys your listing, one transaction does all of this or none of it:

• Their wallet is debited, yours is credited, the platform commission is taken.
• The workflow — nodes and edges — is copied into a new project they own.
• Any compiled custom indicator files the strategy depends on are copied into their library too.
• A receipt is written, and both of you are notified.

The "or none of it" matters. A buyer can never be debited for a strategy whose files did not also arrive, because the debit and the copy are the same database transaction.

The listing cannot leak the thing it sells

Firestore has no field-level read control — a document a user can read, they can read in full. So the paid workflow is not a field on the listing. The public listing document holds the shop-window facts only: name, price, seller, platform, node and edge counts, and a structural preview.

That preview names indicators, triggers and actions and their counts. It never names periods, thresholds, lot sizes, node ids or edges. The line is drawn there deliberately: enough to decide whether a strategy is the kind of thing you want, not enough to rebuild it for free.

There is one deliberate exception. If your strategy uses custom indicators, the listing publishes their file names — because the alternative is selling somebody an EA that cannot compile on their terminal. File names only; never inputs, buffers or wiring.

The receipt is an entitlement, not a copy

If a buyer deletes their copy of a purchased strategy, they can restore it at no charge. The receipt records that they own it, not that one particular project exists.

This was not true at first, and the consequence was bad: deleting a purchased project locked the buyer out permanently, because the receipt doubled as the guard against buying twice. Restore re-copies the graph and the files and repoints the receipt — and refuses while a copy still exists, so it cannot be used to farm copies against a project cap.

Resale is blocked by provenance, not by trust

Every purchased project is stamped with where it came from — the listing, the seller, the date. Publishing refuses any project carrying that stamp.

Without it, a buyer could relist someone else's strategy minutes after buying it, under their own name, because publishing takes any project the caller owns and records them as the seller. The licence text shown on every listing, at publish, and in the Purchased tab makes it a stated rule rather than a bare error message.

Commission, and the honest part about payouts

Commission is 15% on Pro and 5% on Premium, applied at settlement from the seller's live plan — not a rate stamped onto the listing when it was created. The seller keeps the rest, and the arithmetic is exact: what the seller receives plus the platform's cut always equals what the buyer paid.

Now the part that is easy to leave out of a page like this: the terms on which that money can leave. Proceeds land in your TradeSmithy wallet, where they can pay for a plan or buy other strategies immediately. You can also withdraw them to a crypto address, with three conditions worth knowing before your first sale rather than after it: earnings mature 14 days after the sale that produced them, the minimum withdrawal is $50, and only money you earned is withdrawable — funds you deposited yourself are not. Every request is reviewed and sent by a person, so allow time for one. The same terms are on the publish dialog and in the FAQ.

Publishing

Publishing requires a paid plan — Pro or Premium. If your strategy ships compiled indicator files, publishing also requires you to attest that you have the right to redistribute them, recorded against the listing. We cannot verify what is inside a compiled binary, so we ask you to state it rather than implying we checked.

A listing with buyers cannot be deleted by anyone, including us. An operator takedown unlists it instead — buyers restore from that graph, and a refund is priced from it.