Most platforms treat content creators as an afterthought. They ask you to contribute, offer vague promises about visibility, and move on. FailFast is built differently. The question bank is the foundation of everything on the platform. Every practice session, every group challenge, every competition depends on it. Instructors are the people who build and grow that foundation, and the earning model reflects that.
Two Ways to Become an Instructor
There are two separate paths onto the platform as an Instructor.
Standalone Instructor account. This is a dedicated account type for people who want to contribute content without competing. You do not participate in challenges. Your focus is entirely on question creation: writing questions, managing drafts, submitting to the verification pipeline, and optionally creating private quizzes shareable via link or direct invite to specific Challengers. Private quizzes you create do not count toward fail and success point accumulation for the people who take them, so they exist purely as a tool you control.
Challenger-unlocked Instructor role. When a Challenger reaches Expert tier in a specific subject, they unlock Instructor capabilities for that subject directly within their existing account. There is no separate login or account to manage. They keep all their competition access and gain question creation and submission tools on top of it. The unlock is subject-specific: reaching Expert in Chemistry grants Instructor access for Chemistry only. Reaching Expert in multiple subjects grants access for each. Once unlocked, the role is permanent, even if the user goes inactive.
How the Question Submission Pipeline Works
Every question submitted by an Instructor goes through a verification process before it enters the curated question bank. The pipeline checks for accuracy, clarity, correct answer keys, and appropriate difficulty alignment with the assigned level.
Questions that have not yet passed verification appear only in FailFast Mine, the platform's practice mode. They never appear in real-money staking sessions. The integrity of group staking competitions depends entirely on the question bank being verified. This is why the pipeline exists and why it is enforced without exception.
Once a question passes verification, it is live. It can be answered in practice sessions across both Arena and EDU, and in group staking competitions for Arena users.
How Instructors Earn
Instructor earnings come from the platform's revenue pool. The ceiling for all Instructor payouts combined is 5% of the relevant revenue generated from sessions where their questions were used.
Distribution within that pool is proportional: if your questions account for a larger share of the total questions answered across the platform in a given period, you receive a larger share of that 5%.
This is a passive model. Once a question is verified and in the bank, it earns on its own. You do not manage individual sessions, chase individual users, or do anything beyond the initial submission. A well-written question that stays in the bank and holds up under high usage accumulates earnings quietly over time.
The flip side is also true. Low-quality questions that get flagged, pulled, or rarely used earn very little or nothing. The incentive is to write accurately, clearly, and at the right difficulty level from the start.
The Adventurer Mode Path
Challengers who reach Expert tier also unlock Adventurer mode, a personal practice feature where they upload study materials on any subject and the platform generates practice questions from them using AI.
After completing an Adventurer session, the user can choose to submit those AI-generated questions to the public verification pipeline. This step is entirely optional. If those questions pass verification and later appear in staking sessions, the user earns content payouts under the same 5% ceiling system that applies to all Instructor submissions. Questions the user does not submit stay private to their account.
This gives high-tier users a second path to contribute to the bank beyond writing questions manually.
What Makes a Question Worth Submitting
The verification pipeline filters out poorly written questions, incorrect answer keys, and content that does not match its assigned difficulty level. Questions that clear those filters and stay active in the bank are the ones that earn consistently.
A few things that matter in practice:
The answer key must be unambiguously correct. If a question has a defensible alternative answer, it will get flagged. Questions where students report the answer as incorrect get escalated for review and can be removed from the active bank.
The difficulty level must match the assigned tier. A question submitted as University-level that reads like a JSS2 exercise creates noise in the system. Difficulty alignment is checked during verification.
The question must be clearly written. Ambiguous phrasing, double negatives, and questions that rely on obscure interpretation rather than knowledge cause high fail rates that have nothing to do with difficulty. Those questions tend to get flagged.
The stronger your submissions on these three dimensions, the longer they stay active, and the more they earn.