How to judge an AI crypto trading platform

Three products, one word

The first kind is a signal tool. It reads the market and tells you what it thinks, and you place the trade. The second kind is a rule engine, often called a bot, which executes rules you wrote on an exchange you connected with API keys. The third kind is an agent that trades inside your own account under limits you set. The three fail in completely different ways, so a comparison that puts them in one table without saying which is which is not telling you anything.

Who actually executes

Ask where the order is placed. A signal tool never places one. A bot places it on a venue that holds your money and your identity documents, so the bot can be perfect and you still carry the venue's risk. An agent on a non-custodial platform places it in your own account against collateral you hold the keys to. This is the single question that separates the categories and it is the one most comparison pages skip, because the answer is unflattering for most of them.

What you are actually configuring

A budget is not an instruction. An agent needs to know when to act, what it may trade, how much it may put into one position, and when to stop. Ask whether you set a per-trade size as well as a total, whether there is a daily stop, and what that daily stop does when it triggers. On TRUE a daily stop means no new trades for the rest of the UTC day, open positions keep their stops, and it resets at midnight UTC. If a platform cannot answer that question in one sentence, it has not thought about it.

What pause means

Pausing an agent stops it opening new positions. It does not close the ones already open, and it does not cancel a scheduled order that lives somewhere else. Platforms differ here and the difference matters most on the day you want out. Before you fund anything, find out what pause does, what close does, and which one you will actually want under pressure.

The costs nobody lists

A subscription is the smallest number. Trading fees, network fees, funding on any perpetual position you hold, and slippage on the size you actually trade all cost more over a month than the licence. Setup on TRUE is free, you pay trading and network fees, and shared strategies carry a creator profit share. Ask every platform for the same four numbers and compare those, not the headline.

Where TRUE sits

TRUE is the third kind. Autopilot trades 24 hours a day inside a budget and risk limits you set, Agent Studio lets you build an agent without writing code, and both execute in your own non-custodial account on TRUE's own perp engine. Perps, spot, memecoins on four chains and tokenised stocks sit in the same account, so moving between them needs no second app. There is no KYC, and TRUE is not available to residents of the United States.

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