Nobody here can touch your money

Your exchange keys are encrypted on your own computer. They are not uploaded, not copied to us, and not in any database we run. Trades are placed from your machine on your own exchange account, and your coins never move anywhere near us.

If you lose your passphrase, we cannot get your keys back for you. That is not a hole in the product. It is the only proof that everything in the paragraph above it is true.

How connecting an exchange works What the public record holds

Your keys live: On your machine; encrypted, and nowhere else
We can recover: Nothing; if we could, we would have them
Money we hold: None, ever; trades run on your own account
Withdrawal access: Refused; the app will not use such a key

How it works

Four places this could go wrong, and does not

Almost every disaster in this industry has been a company holding something it did not need to hold. So here is each point where we could have held something, and what happens instead.

1 · Your keys are locked with your passphrase

You connect an exchange by pasting in an API key. It is encrypted on your computer using a key worked out from a passphrase only you know, and written to storage on that machine. It is never sent to us, never backed up to us, and is not in any database we run.

2 · A key that can withdraw is refused

Exchanges let you decide what a key is allowed to do. Give this one permission to trade and nothing else. If you hand over a key that can also move money out, the app checks, says so, and will not use it. It does not accept it quietly and ask you to trust us.

3 · Orders go straight from you to your exchange

When a strategy decides to buy, the order is signed on your machine and sent to your exchange account. It does not pass through a server of ours on the way. Your coins stay in your exchange account throughout, which is exactly where they were before you met us.

4 · The public record says nothing about you

Every decision goes on the chain so the track record can be checked. What goes on it is the asset, the direction, how confident the engine was and why, which model version ran, and the time. Not your name, not your balance, not how much you put in, not what you made or lost.

How to check anybody's claim

Ask whether they can get your keys back

Everybody in this business says non-custodial. It costs nothing to put on a website and most of the time it is not quite true. There is one question that settles it, and it works on us as well as on anyone else.

If I forget my passphrase, can you restore my keys? A company that can say yes has your keys. There is no other way it could be done. Everything else, the certifications and the security pages and the reassuring language, sits on top of that one fact.

Our answer is no. You would go to your exchange, cancel the old key and issue a new one, which takes a couple of minutes and is annoying. We would rather be annoying in that specific way than be comfortable in the other one.

What the chain sees, and what it does not

recorded on the chain        never recorded
────────────────────────     ────────────────────────
asset            BTC         your api key
direction        long        your passphrase
confidence       0.71        who you are
the breakdown    5 inputs    your balance
model version    q-1.4.2     how much you put in
timestamp        14:02:11Z   the price you got
input hash       0x7c1e…     what you made or lost

The board at the top of this page is those two lists, moving. Watch the right-hand column pass through and the left-hand column hit the wall. A public record of what was decided is useful to everybody. A public record of what you hold would be a permanent liability with your name on it, and no amount of usefulness would be worth that.

The part we would rather you heard from us

This removes one risk, not all of them. We cannot lose your money because we never have it. Your exchange still can, and exchanges have. Your own settings can, and a badly configured strategy will lose money perfectly efficiently. The market can, and regularly does. What this removes is the specific risk of us, which happens to be the one that has ended most of the disasters in this industry, but it is one risk out of four.

Your computer is now part of the security. Keys on your machine means keys on your machine. If somebody has malware on it, or full access to your logged-in account, they are inside the boundary this page is describing and nothing on our side can help. Keeping the machine clean and the passphrase strong is genuinely your job, and it is not a job we can do for you or take back from you later.

Lose the passphrase and the keys are gone. No reset link, no support ticket, no recovery. You go to your exchange, revoke the old key and make a new one. Nothing of yours is lost when that happens, because the key was only ever permission to trade and never the money itself. But we want you to know before you set the passphrase, not after.

Connecting an exchangeWhich venues, and how to set a key up so it can only trade.Risk controlsThe other risk on the list, and the settings that bound it.