You do not move your money anywhere to use this. Connect the exchanges you already have accounts on, give the engine permission to place orders, and your coins stay exactly where they are.
The engine has no preferred venue and nothing to gain from sending your order one way rather than another. When Atheron's own exchange goes live it joins the list on the same terms as everybody else, with no shortcut.
Connecting one
Three of these four steps happen on your exchange rather than here, which is the point. Nothing about this hands anything over.
On your exchange, create an API key and tick the box for trading. Leave withdrawals switched off. That single setting is the difference between a key that can place orders and a key that can empty the account, and it takes about a minute.
Paste the key into the app. It is encrypted straight away using your passphrase and kept on your own machine. If the key you paste can withdraw after all, the app tells you and refuses to use it rather than accepting it and promising to behave.
Most exchanges let you say which internet address a key may be used from. Setting that means a stolen key is useless to anybody else. The setup walks you through it instead of hiding it in an advanced menu that nobody opens.
The engine trades wherever your strategy says to trade. It has no preferred exchange, no routing deals and nothing to gain from sending your order one way rather than another. When our own exchange goes live, it joins the list on exactly the same terms.
Which exchanges
You have seen the page every product in this category has. Twenty exchange logos in a neat grid, half of them greyed out with "coming soon" underneath, and no way to tell which half actually works today.
We are not doing that. The list of venues supported at launch gets published in full before the closed beta opens, when it is a list of things that have been built and tested rather than a list of things we would like. It will cover the major spot exchanges most people already use.
After that the list grows. Adding a venue is fairly ordinary plumbing work rather than research, so it comes down to what people ask for. If the exchange you use is not there at launch, that is a real reason to wait, and we would rather you waited than paid for something that turns out not to reach your account.
read balances and positions yes needed to size a trade
place and cancel orders yes this is the actual job
withdraw funds no refused if you enable it
transfer between accounts no not requested
change account settings no not requested
allowed from your own address onlyThe board at the top of this page is one machine with a route out to each connected venue. Watch the endpoints: one is usually rate limiting and occasionally one stops answering, and an order sent there comes back marked rather than quietly vanishing. Our own exchange sits in that list drawn exactly like the rest, because it gets exactly the same treatment.