Safety and custody

Archon never holds your funds. They stay in your Hyperliquid account the whole time. What Archon is given is narrower: an API wallet, which your account authorises to sign orders for it.

The two keys

Your main wallet owns the Hyperliquid account. It deposits, withdraws, transfers, and creates or replaces API wallets. Archon never asks for it, never sees it and never stores it. Neither does the self-host runbook: it forbids your assistant from asking for, accepting or storing a seed phrase or a main wallet’s private key.

An API wallet is a separate key that your main wallet authorises on Hyperliquid’s API page. It signs orders for the account. That is the key Archon uses.

Can an API wallet withdraw?

We tested it. On 28 October 2026, on Hyperliquid’s testnet, we signed three money-moving actions with an API wallet authorised for a funded account: a bridge withdrawal (withdraw3), a USDC transfer (usdSend) and a spot transfer (spotSend). Each asked to move 1 USDC to the account’s own address. Hyperliquid refused all three with Must deposit before performing actions, naming the API wallet’s own address, which has never held funds. The account’s balance did not change.

That is consistent with how Hyperliquid describes API wallets: money-moving actions are signed by the account owner, not by an agent.

What this does not show yet:

• It was on testnet, one account, one date. We will repeat it on mainnet before any real-money account goes live, and publish the result.
• It covers those three actions. It does not mean the key is harmless: an API wallet can trade your account, and a careless program could trade it badly. That is what the engine’s limits, the halt and close-all are for.

The record is docs/evidence/agent-key-withdraw-2026-10-28.md in Archon’s repository.

What the engine will and will not do

The engine’s limits are written into its code (platform/archon/engine.py and platform/archon/app/trader.py) and described in How the engine works.

It will	It will not
Trade only the markets your rule trades	Touch positions in any other market
Hold longs only, at 1x cross margin, or your Turbo level up to the strategy’s measured maximum	Go short, or exceed the leverage you chose
Size each position as one equal slot of the account	Let total positions exceed the account
Use orders that fill immediately or cancel	Leave orders resting on the book
Sell everything and stop at a 30% fall from the peak	Clear a halt by itself, or on restart
Attach a builder fee on mainnet once you approve it	Charge a builder fee you have not approved
Read balances, positions and fills for the dashboard	Withdraw, transfer, bridge or deposit

Where the key is stored

Archon Hosted

• The API wallet key is stored only as AES-256-GCM ciphertext.
• Each ciphertext is bound to your account address. A record copied onto another account will not decrypt.
• The master key lives in the server’s environment, never in the database. A copy of the database alone yields nothing.
• The key is decrypted only inside the engine, when an order needs signing.

Self-hosted

The key stays on your machine. Archon’s platform never receives it. The runbook tells your assistant to keep it out of logs, out of chat transcripts and out of any file it might share.

If Archon’s servers were compromised

We think you should know the worst case. Someone who took both the database and the server’s master key could decrypt hosted API wallet keys and place trades on those accounts until the keys were replaced. They could not withdraw or transfer funds with them, as far as the testnet evidence above shows. The halt would not stop trades placed outside Archon’s engine.

Your defence, hosted or not, is the same: replace the API wallet, which takes a minute on Hyperliquid and takes effect at once.

Practice first

• Testnet opens on 30 October 2026. Hyperliquid’s testnet uses play USDC. The engine runs exactly as it would on mainnet.
• Mainnet comes per account, after a seven-day soak on testnet without an incident, and only when you choose it.
• Start mainnet with Archon limited to part of the account if you want to watch it with less at stake.

Cutting Archon off

From gentlest to final:

1. Pause new trades. Exits keep running.
2. Close everything. Archon sells what it manages and opens nothing.
3. Disconnect (hosted). Archon deletes its copy of the key, after closing your positions or straight away, as you choose.
4. Replace the API wallet. On Hyperliquid’s API page, create a new API wallet with the same name, archon. Hyperliquid deregisters the old key immediately, and Archon can no longer sign anything for your account.
5. Let it expire. Every API wallet has an expiry you chose when you made it.

Whatever you do, your positions stay on Hyperliquid and you can manage them yourself in Hyperliquid’s own app.

Payments

Payments go to securepath.eth, which resolves to 0x67683ea19559aee0f6cefc2997ec9cf31ff8ecac. The app re-resolves the name on every start and refuses to take payments if it no longer matches, so a hijacked or mistyped name cannot redirect a payment. Signing in costs nothing and asks for no transaction; the only transaction Archon ever asks you to send is the payment you choose to make.

What no software can protect you from

• Losses. The rules can lose money. The halt limits a fall; it does not prevent one.
• Hyperliquid itself. Your funds sit on Hyperliquid. An outage or failure there is outside Archon’s control.
• Fast markets. Orders cross up to 1% to fill. In a sharp move an order can miss, and the next cycle tries again from a worse price.
• A machine that sleeps. A self-hosted engine protects nothing while it is not running.