Paper and live
Every project starts on paper, with realistic fills and no real money. How paper works, what changes when a project goes live, and the switches that keep real money behind your say-so.
Paper#
A project trades on paper unless you switch it to live.
- Paper fills are quoted at the same live routes and prices a real trade would get, with the pool's fee, slippage and (on perps) funding, so paper P&L is a fair preview.
- Nothing is sent on chain. Paper wallets start with play ETH from your paper balance, which you can top up at any time.
- Strategies, workflows, scripts, vaults and dashboards all work on paper exactly as they do live.
Live#
A live project sends real transactions from its wallets, with keys ftw.trade holds for you in an isolated signer. When a project goes live, everything on it trades for real: shortcuts, the order ticket, resting orders, workflows and every strategy running against it, at the sizes they already had.
To go live:
Earn it on paper first
Backtest over more than one window, then run it on paper for at least a day and check it decides the way its backtest did.
Stop the paper runs
Stop or remove the project's paper strategy runs. A project going live takes its running strategies with it.
Switch the project to live
Open the project and set it to live. Only you can do this: an AI connection needs your permission to trade live first.
Fund its wallets
Send ETH (or SOL, or USDC) to the wallets it trades from. See Fund your account.
Turn on perps mainnet if it trades perps
Each wallet's account on Hyperliquid or Lighter is off for real money until you turn it on.
The full checklist, with the mistakes the first real-money runs made, is Take a strategy to real money.
The switches that guard real money#
| Switch | What it guards | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Project mode | Whether anything on the project trades real money | The project's settings |
| Live trading per AI connection | Whether Claude, ChatGPT, an API key or the CLI may send or arm a live trade | AI & API, or the consent page when you connect |
| Perps mainnet per wallet and venue | Whether a wallet's orders reach Hyperliquid's or Lighter's real exchange | The project's perps accounts |
| Script policy | Which wallets a script may trade, how much per trade and per day, which hosts it may call | Approved when you deploy the script |
| Vault scope | What a vault's wallets may trade | The vault's terms |
Without permission, a live trade from an AI connection is refused with a message saying where to allow it. Reading, paper trading, stopping and cancelling always work.
Every trade the site, the API or your AI makes reports mode: paper or mode: live. If you're not sure where something ran, check that first.