What "connecting" actually means

WatchCrypto never takes custody of your money. Connecting a wallet authorises a trading-only agent key on the exchange itself — a key that can place, amend and cancel orders on your behalf and cannot withdraw funds. That restriction is enforced by the venue, not by us, and you can revoke the key on the venue at any time.

You never paste a seed phrase, and on the wallet route you never paste a private key either. You sign a message, and that is the whole handshake.

Four ways in — all of them end in the same place

Open the terminal and the trade dock shows the Connect card. Every door below walks the identical path afterwards, so pick whichever you already have:

Door	Best for	What happens
Browser wallet	You already hold crypto	Your existing wallet signs. Shortest path to a live order form.
Google	No wallet yet	Mints a real non-custodial wallet for you, then signs without a popup.
Email	No wallet, no social login	Same as above, with a one-time code to your inbox.

The Google and email doors mint a genuine non-custodial wallet through Privy, split across three Shamir shares in a secure enclave. We never hold a key — and neither does any single party. The practical difference is that an embedded wallet signs without a confirmation popup, so the whole setup is one screen.

Which wallet for which venue

The two venues live on different chains, so they want different wallets:

Venue	Wallet	Funded with	Signatures
Hyperliquid	Ethereum — MetaMask, Rabby, or an embedded one	USDC on Arbitrum One	Two
Bulk	Solana — Phantom, Backpack, Solflare	USDC on Solana	One

You can connect both. The terminal follows whichever accounts you have connected, and if you have two you can set a default on your account page.

What you are signing

Read the prompts rather than clicking through them — that is good practice everywhere, and here there is nothing to hide:

Authorise trading. Registers the agent key described above. No withdrawal permission exists on it.
Approve the builder fee. An on-chain approval that lets our fee ride along with your orders — 0.01% on Hyperliquid and Bulk, charged on top of the venue's own fee. It is a cap, not a charge: nothing is taken unless you trade. That fee is the entire business model, which is laid out on how we make money.

On Bulk both of those are bundled into a single signature. On Hyperliquid they are two, and an embedded wallet does both silently.

What we cannot do

Withdraw, transfer or bridge your funds. The agent key has no such permission at the protocol level.
See your seed phrase or private key. On the wallet route they never leave your wallet; on the embedded route no single party holds a whole key.
Trade without you. Orders are placed when you place them.

More detail, including how keys are stored for the API route, is on the security page.

If something goes wrong

"Must deposit before performing actions"

Hyperliquid will not accept a signature from an address it has never seen. Fund the account first and the approval goes through — see funding a Hyperliquid account.

"Too many cumulative requests"

Hyperliquid caps actions per address. A wallet with a busy history can hit the cap on its first approval; the terminal waits and retries automatically, so give it a few seconds rather than clicking again.

The wallet popup never appeared

Check for a blocked popup, and make sure the wallet is unlocked and on the right network. For Bulk you must be signed in to WatchCrypto before connecting the Solana wallet.

Connect Hyperliquid — step by step, including the API-key route.
Connect Bulk — the one-signature Solana flow.
Your first trade — placing an order with a take-profit and a stop-loss.

Connect a wallet. Trade from the chart.