The milestone lifecycle
A milestone moves through four stages before it earns any Rewards for anyone.
1. Proposed
The athlete (or their guardian, for under-18s) opens a milestone claim from their dashboard. They pick the milestone from the catalogue that best fits what they achieved, attach evidence, and submit.
Evidence varies by milestone type — official race results, timing sheets, selection letters, team announcements, ranking screenshots, media coverage, signed contracts. The catalogue specifies what is required for each milestone.
2. Under review
A ralli reviewer opens the claim, cross-checks the evidence, and makes an approve/reject/request-more-info decision. For milestones that can be verified against public federation data (rankings, official results), the check is fast. For milestones that require judgement (media coverage, selections announced verbally), it takes longer.
Reviewers are trained on the milestone catalogue and are not the same people who onboarded the athlete. That separation is deliberate.
3. Approved
Once approved, ARP is added to the athlete's balance and the milestone becomes visible on their public profile as a verified achievement. The athlete gets a notification. So do their recent backers — you see a "milestone approved" event on your dashboard for every athlete you back.
Approval alone does not yet trigger a Reward payout. That happens at the next stage.
4. Converted to Reward Pool
Every athlete on ralli has a rewards pool that accrues in the background: 15% of the value of every member Credit allocated to them, plus a 25-point founding pool seed from ralli the day they are approved. The pool is shown live on their public profile, so backers always know what is sitting there.
When a milestone is approved, it releases a percentage of that available pool, set by the level of the result:
- 15% — local & club results (PBs, club champion, sanctioned wins)
- 25% — regional and national qualifying results
- 35% — national elite results (national podiums, national selection)
- 50% — international and professional results
Two mechanics stop a pool from sitting idle. A waiting boost adds +5% to the release for every 90 days an athlete goes without a verified milestone, up to +25% — so a quiet athlete's comeback milestone pays out far more. And a pool ceiling means that if a pool ever grows beyond roughly six months of accrual, the excess is released on the next verified milestone. Points cannot pile up unspent.
Every release has a floor of 5 points wherever the pool can cover it, and the split uses a largest-remainder method so no active backer is ever rounded down to nothing. The release is split pro-rata across every member who allocated Credits to that athlete in the 90 days ending on the approval date.
Your share is calculated as: (your Credits allocated to that athlete in the last 90 days) ÷ (total Credits allocated to that athlete in the last 90 days by all backers) × the release.
Two worked examples
Example 1 — the grassroots milestone. Athlete: Ollie, a 17-year-old club swimmer. His available pool sits at 60 points. He clocks a verified personal best at a sanctioned meet — a club-level result, so a 15% release: 9 points.
His backer allocation over the previous 90 days is 400 Credits, split as:
- Jess allocated 100 Credits (25%) — earns 2 points
- Marcus allocated 200 Credits (50%) — earns 5 points
- Dani allocated 100 Credits (25%) — earns 2 points
Small — but real, redeemable in the Vault at roughly 1 point to $1 RRP, and paid for backing him before the PB dropped.
Example 2 — the national milestone. Athlete: Mia, a middle-distance runner with a bigger circle and a pool of 240 points. She earns national U20 selection — a national elite result, so a 35% release: 84 points.
Her backer allocation over the previous 90 days is 800 Credits, split as:
- Alex allocated 200 Credits (25%) — earns 21 points
- Priya allocated 400 Credits (50%) — earns 42 points
- Sam allocated 200 Credits (25%) — earns 21 points
Had Mia gone six months without a verified milestone first, the waiting boost would have lifted that release to 45% — 108 points across the same three backers.
Why 90 days?
90 days is deliberately long enough to capture consistent backers and short enough to be meaningful. It rewards the members who backed the athlete before the milestone — when it mattered — not people who piled in the day the news broke.
If you allocated 100 Credits to Mia six months ago and stopped, you are not in the pool. If you started backing her a month ago and have kept going, you are.
Launch-athlete bonuses
Backing an athlete inside their first 10 days on the platform (their "launch window") earns Rewards at 10:3 instead of 10:1 — three times the standard rate. Those bonus Rewards are on top of, not instead of, any milestone-based Reward pools you become eligible for.
What counts as a milestone — the full range
The catalogue spans everything from grassroots progress to elite results. The exact list is sport-specific, but here is the general shape and why we deliberately built it wide:
Grassroots & emerging (25–150 ARP) — the everyday wins that matter when an athlete is building. These now include:
- Sanctioned event entry
- Verified personal best (from an official timing sheet at a sanctioned event)
- Club champion / club championship podium
- School or college champion
- Regional podium / regional title
- Age-grade regional champion
- Age-grade or representative squad selection
- First team debut
- Named team captain or vice-captain
- Regional ranking — top 10
- Local league title
- Club player of the year
- Local media feature
National (150–400 ARP) — national qualifiers, national podiums, national ranking positions, national championship results, representative national squad selections, major sponsors, scholarships.
Elite (600–1000 ARP) — national champion titles, international podiums, national team debuts, international caps, international titles, professional contracts signed.
ARP values are calibrated so that a well-supported athlete having a genuinely good year — at whatever level they are at — produces a Reward pool their backers actually feel. Grassroots milestones pay modest Rewards; elite milestones pay large ones. Both matter.
What is NOT a milestone
Just as important as what counts is what does not:
- Unverified training PBs (a PB only counts when it comes from official timing at a sanctioned event)
- Social media follower counts
- Personal announcements without a competitive result, selection or public evidence behind them
- Predicted or expected achievements ("about to be selected")
If it cannot be independently verified against a result, a selection letter, a contract, a ranking or a published article, it does not go in the catalogue.
Disputes and re-reviews
Every approved milestone is visible on the athlete's public profile with the underlying evidence type stated. If any member has reason to believe a milestone was approved incorrectly, they can flag it. Flagged milestones are re-reviewed by a second reviewer. Overturned milestones claw back the ARP and the associated Reward pool.
This has happened a handful of times — usually a milestone catalogued at one tier that should have been catalogued at another. Reviews are corrected quickly and publicly.
The bigger picture
The reason ralli built ARP and milestone payouts the way we did is simple: we wanted your rewards to be tied to something real. Not to how much you spent, not to how loud you cheered, not to a marketing team's decision — but to the actual, verifiable progress of the athlete you chose to back. Whether that progress is a first club title or a national cap, if you were there for the climb, you share in the win.
Related reading
Ready to get involved? Apply as an athlete or become a member and start backing the athletes you believe in. Learn more about how ralli works and our transparency commitments.
