Your money stays yours: how non-custodial bots actually work

When you click 'Use this bot' on PolyQuantX, three things happen on-chain. Your wallet creates a special account — kind of like a sub-account just for this bot. The bot gets 'session keys' to that sub-account: permission to place trades, but never to withdraw funds. Your USDC subscription fee gets locked into a smart contract that releases it to us over the month.

If any one of those steps fails, the whole thing rolls back. You never end up in a half-state where you've paid but the bot can't trade, or where the bot can trade but you've paid nothing. It's atomic.

Why this matters: in 2022, several crypto exchanges paused withdrawals, and customers lost access to their funds for weeks or forever. Non-custodial means you never give up that access. We can't pause your withdrawals. We can't loan out your USDC. We can't even see your balance if you don't show us.

The trade-off is responsibility. You need to keep your wallet seed phrase safe. If you lose it, neither we nor anyone else can help you recover your USDC. Treat the seed like a password you can't ever reset.

Connect a wallet, fund it with a few USDC, click 'Use this bot' on something low-risk like Sports Conservative. Watch the equity curve for a week. You'll see exactly what 'self-custodial' feels like in practice.