Safety
Handing software the ability to trade is a big ask. Here is exactly what stops it going wrong, in the order that matters.
Six things that protect you
1Your money never moves to us
It stays in your own exchange account the entire time. We are not a bank, a broker, or a wallet. There is no balance to lose if we disappear tomorrow.
2The key we hold cannot cash out
Coinbase lets you create keys with limited powers. We require one that can buy and sell inside your account but cannot withdraw a cent. Even in the worst case, nobody can take your money out with it.
3A second opinion on every trade
Before an order leaves, a separate part of the software checks it against your limits — size, daily spend, how much of one coin you already hold. If it breaks a rule, it is blocked. The strategy does not get to overrule the safety check.
4Limits you set, in dollars
Not percentages you have to decode. The most one trade can spend. The most it can spend today. The most you'll ever hold of one thing. Simple numbers you can picture.
5A protective stop on everything you hold
Every position automatically gets a stop that follows the price up as it rises and sells if it falls too far from its high. You don't have to remember to set it; it is set for you.
6The stop button
One press halts every trade everywhere, immediately, and keeps it halted until you say otherwise. It is always visible — never buried in a settings menu.
How it's built to behave
Careful by default
Out of the box, nothing trades without your approval, and everything runs in practice mode. Automation is something you deliberately switch on after a checklist, not something we switch on for you.
Small on purpose
Default trade sizes are small. When the market looks choppy, the software makes them smaller still, on its own. It is designed to survive a bad month, not to win a good week.
It says no a lot
Most days, the honest answer is "nothing worth doing today" — so that's what it says. A tool that always finds a reason to trade is a tool that is selling you activity.
The days it said no
These happened on our own account while we were building. We could describe the guards in the abstract; we'd rather show you the days they earned their keep — and one day we got something wrong.
30 July 2026
The morning it wanted everything at once
The market's mood reading flipped between "rising" and "sideways" every couple of minutes, and when a days-long pause on buying lifted, every waiting buy tried to go through in the same minute. The spending caps held, and the stop button did its job — but we didn't like what we saw. Since that morning it places at most one automatic buy per pass, a change of market mood has to last 45 minutes before it changes anything, and a coin that was just sold can't be re-bought for four hours unless the price has genuinely fallen. That morning is why those rules exist.
a quiet evening in August
The trade it refused to place on a guess
A trade was approved, and at that exact moment the live price feed stopped answering. The software had an older price it could have used. It refused. A trade placed on a stale price writes down the wrong cost, and that wrong number then feeds the break-even check, the profit target, and the "you paid" figure on your screen. So it waited a minute for a real quote and placed the trade then. Waiting costs a minute. Guessing costs the truth of every number that follows.
2 August 2026
The protection that had quietly retired
We found 26 watching rules that had fired once and never gone back to watching — including protective stops on coins actually held. The screen said they were on guard; they weren't. Nothing was lost, but we'd built the exact failure we fear most: something wrong, and nothing saying so. Now every rule returns to watching once its moment has passed, and the engine reports its own health every minute so a silence like that can't hide again. We're telling you because that's the deal on this site.
How your key is stored
Your key is encrypted before it is saved, and it is used for one thing only: placing the trades your settings allow. It is never shown back to you in full after you enter it, never shared with anyone, and never sold. You can disconnect it from inside the app, or cancel it at Coinbase, whenever you like.
What we can't protect you from
Being straight with you matters more than sounding safe. Prices can fall hard and fast, and in a sharp drop a sale can happen at a worse price than your stop. Your protective stops are watched by our software rather than held at Coinbase, so if we are offline they are not being watched — a real limitation, and one you should weigh. Coinbase has its own outages and its own risks. Software and internet connections fail sometimes.
These limits make losses smaller and more predictable. They cannot promise a profit, and they cannot prevent every loss. Please read the risk notice before you connect anything.
Judge it for yourself
We publish what our own account does every month, losing months included.
See the results →