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Last updated: September 2026

Contracting entity: The 1.21 Initiative Ltd, a private limited company registered in England and Wales, company number 16726981 ("we", "us", "the Company").

Use of this site

This website describes the engineering practice, systems, and services of The 1.21 Initiative Ltd. Content is provided in good faith for general information. You may browse, link to, and share it freely.

No investment advice, no offer of securities

Nothing on this site is investment advice, research, an offer to sell, or a solicitation of an offer to buy any security, financial instrument, or interest in any fund or vehicle. We are an engineering practice: we design, build, and operate software systems with our own capital. Descriptions of our trading systems are engineering documentation of capabilities and design intent — not performance marketing. Trading involves substantial risk of loss, including loss of principal; decisions about your capital are yours alone.

Performance information

Metrics shown on this site — including signal-precision characteristics, risk-envelope figures, and latency measurements — describe engineered system characteristics and internal monitoring targets. Simulation and backtest results are model outputs, not records of client or firm account performance. Verified live-capital metrics are disclosed only to qualified institutional counterparties under written confidentiality terms. Past or hypothetical performance — simulated or live — is not indicative of future results.

The MCP product

quant-swarm (the "MCP Servers") provides developer tools — pre-trade invariant checkers, data assembly, and regime-fragility probes — accessed through MCP clients. The client software is open source under the licences published in its repository; these terms govern the hosted services behind it: the data relay, token issuance and verification, and any hosted endpoints.

We issue access tokens on a free plan (a limited monthly allowance of relay calls and no hosted compute) and sell credit packs that add a fixed number of credits to your token. Credits are consumed according to the published rate card on /docs/ — one credit per relay data call, one per hosted single-shot Pro tool, one per simulated episode of hosted compute, and a fixed number per Shadow Tournament run. Pro access is credit-based: there is no unlimited plan, the credit pool on your token is the only capacity you can consume, and a token whose pool is empty or expired reverts to the free plan's tools until credits are added. We may change the rate card prospectively by posting the new rates on this site; credits already deducted are not re-priced.

Shadow Tournament and contributions

The Shadow Tournament (tournament.submit) scores a strategy genome you submit against our trading swarm's current champion on identical simulated market paths and returns a paired statistical outcome and a rating. It is a research and engineering service: the outcome is not a promotion, not a recommendation, not an offer to trade or manage capital, and not investment advice.

  • What you send. A submission transmits the genome parameter vector (the fields of the public genome schema), its hash, and your contribution choice. You must not include personal data, secrets, third-party confidential information, or anything you do not have the right to submit.
  • Standard submission (no contribution). We use the vector solely to run the tournament. Once scored, the vector is deleted from the job record; we retain the genome hash, the paired statistics, the outcome and the rating, and may publish the hash prefix and rating on an anonymised leaderboard.
  • Contribution licence. If you set contribute=true you grant The 1.21 Initiative a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive licence to store the submitted genome vector and its tournament outcome; to use, evaluate, mutate, combine, and derive from it within our strategy-evolution systems, including as a challenger or parent in future breeding cycles; and to deploy any resulting strategies, including with capital. You retain ownership of your own genome and may continue to use it freely. In return the submission is charged at the published contributor rate.
  • Warranties. You warrant that you have the right to grant this licence and that the submission does not infringe any third party's rights or breach any obligation you owe. You indemnify us against claims arising from a breach of this warranty.
  • No obligation, no attribution, no compensation. We are not obliged to use any contribution, to tell you whether it was used, or to compensate you beyond the discounted price. No attribution is given; leaderboard entries are anonymised hash prefixes.
  • Refunds. A run we cannot complete (panel unavailable, unscorable tier-B/C mutation, runner outage) is refunded to your credit pool automatically. A completed run is charged regardless of its outcome.
  • Fair use. You may not submit genomes designed to probe, reverse-engineer, or degrade the champion, the panel, or the selection machinery, nor automate submissions beyond the published rate limits.

Credit packs — purchase, validity, refunds

  • One-time payment. Credit packs are paid for once, up front, via Stripe. There is no subscription and no auto-renewal; nothing recurring is charged to you.
  • Validity. Each credit pack is valid for 90 days from purchase. Unused credits expire at the end of that window. Buying again before expiry extends your validity window to the later of the two expiry dates; credits purchased earlier keep their remaining validity.
  • No rollover beyond the window. Expired credits are not restored or converted.
  • Refunds. Credit packs are digital allowances consumed on demand. Because usage is metered at the moment of each call, purchases are non-refundable except where required by law or where we are unable to provide the service at all (in which case we will refund unused credits). Disputes are handled per the contact section below.
  • Price changes. We may change credit-pack prices at any time. Changes apply only to purchases made after the change is posted on this site; credits you have already bought are unaffected.
  • Taxes. Where applicable, VAT or other sales taxes are calculated and charged at checkout via Stripe Tax based on your location.

Acceptable use of the MCP product

You may use the MCP Servers and the relay under your own token for legitimate engineering and research. You may not:

  • share, resell, sublicense, or make your token available to third parties (one token, one user);
  • attempt to bypass, exceed, or evade rate limits, quota, or credit metering;
  • use the service to scrape, reconstruct, or redistribute the underlying vendor market data or the raw values behind our derived analytics;
  • probe, interfere with, or overload the hosted services;
  • use the service for any unlawful purpose.

Market-data licensing. The relay serves derived analytics (ratios, percentile ranks, labels, buckets, counts). It never echoes raw provider values to the client, and we do not grant you a licence to redistribute vendor data. You may reconstruct or resell underlying vendor data only to the extent your own sources independently authorise it. We may suspend tokens that are being used to circumvent these restrictions.

Service availability

The MCP product is provided on a best-efforts basis. The free plan carries no service-level commitment. Credit-based service is provided with reasonable commercial availability but, except where required by law, we give no uptime guarantee and no service credit commitment. We may suspend or terminate any token — including one with unused credits — if we reasonably believe it is being used in breach of these terms, is compromised, or poses a risk to the service. Where a token is terminated for breach, unused credits are forfeited.

Institutional access

The "Request Institutional Access" channel is a qualification-gated informational channel for professional, institutional, and B2B counterparties. Submission of a request does not create any client relationship, entitle the requester to any information, or constitute an offer of any kind. Access, where granted, is subject to qualification review, mutual nondisclosure terms, and applicable law.

Engagements

Consulting work is governed by a separate written agreement covering scope, deliverables, fees, confidentiality, and intellectual property. In any conflict between this page and a signed agreement, the agreement wins.

Limitation of liability

To the maximum extent permitted by law, The 1.21 Initiative Ltd's aggregate liability arising out of or in connection with the MCP product or this site — whether in contract, tort (including negligence), or otherwise — is limited to the amount you paid us in the 90 days before the event giving rise to the claim. We are not liable for any indirect, incidental, special, or consequential loss, loss of profits, trading losses, or loss of data, even if advised of the possibility. Nothing in these terms limits liability that cannot be limited under English law.

No warranties

The site and the MCP product are provided "as is". We make reasonable efforts to keep information accurate but make no warranty that it is complete, current, or error-free, and we accept no liability for actions taken in reliance on it. In particular, outputs from the MCP Servers are engineering and research analytics, not trading recommendations.

Intellectual property

Site content, branding, and design are © The 1.21 Initiative Ltd unless otherwise noted. Don't reuse them commercially without permission. The open-source MCP client is licensed separately as published in its repository; the selection machinery behind the hosted services is proprietary and withheld by design.

Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales have exclusive jurisdiction over any dispute.

Contact

Questions or refund requests: contact@121initiative.com. The 1.21 Initiative Ltd, company number 16726981, England and Wales.