After reviewing the contract that I signed, in fine print, it appears that OneUp has the authority to switch their 'live traders' managed accounts from 'live' to 'demo' environments at will without notifying the trader. In practicality, this is probably legal protection, and if you read in between the lines, probably means that OneUp primarily earns money from failed evaluations and that they either don't offer truly 'live' accounts or that truly 'live' accounts are reserved for people who are successful on their 'live' simulator.
Kind of like how TopStep has 'funded preparation', OneUp basically has a secondary "hidden" 'live demo'. I put that in quotation marks to emphasize that technically anyone can read the contract and discover the same information and that OneUp has done absolutely nothing legally wrong (yet). It's clear in the contract that even if you're a live trader with them that they don't have to give you a real funded account to trade.
At any rate, and how this affects most people, is that contained in the same clause is affirmation that the trader is paid compensation regardless of if they traded/performed on live or demo. So, basically, it doesn't matter that their 'live account' is demo; if you earn money within their parameters they (theoretically, remember I've not confirmed a withdrawal yet) will indeed payout. Perhaps after a few weeks or months of performance, once they trust you, then maybe you truly do go 'live' for real, but this is just my conjecture.
So, as of now, I think OneUp is following bullet point #2 in my above post; to summarize:
1) Their business model is to primarily make money off of failed evaluations and eventually find the holy grail of true talent. Nothing new here, TST does the exact same thing.
2) If you fail the evaluation, they make money. If you pass, you're essentially put on a probation period where you have to further prove yourself, but this has the caveat that you're still paid compensation as if it was real. If the trader fails at this step, no harm no foul, OneUp takes no risk, liability, or realized losses.
3) This is conjecture, but I'd imagine that eventually, after you have proven your statistical market advantage, that you truly do go live and they earn 20% commissions off of you. OneUp takes a realized loss at first [but is a far lower realized loss than having a larger quantity of live accounts implode] but has now found their 'holy grail' of trading talent -- the 3% -- and they move them to a real account and probably begin earning 20% commissions immediately based on the trader's historic performance record.
P.S. As an aside, this is probably a better business model to find real trading talent because it takes out of the equation all of the failed traders from the evaluations and all of the failed traders who essentially got lucky for a funded account only to immediately implode it. It's, in my opinion, a pretty effective approach to make money on the journey of finding the cream of the crop of traders.