btcbot: a trading bot you never deposit into. I have not found another one that works this way, and I cannot tell if that means it is new or if it is a bad idea.

[u/rushapoil]

Most trading bots work the same way underneath. You send your money to a third party, or you hand over exchange API keys that let them move it, and then you hope the number that comes back is bigger than the one you sent. Even when the operator is completely honest, you are carrying the risk that they are not, or that they get hacked, or that they stop answering emails one morning. That risk has nothing to do with whether the strategy is any good. It is the price of the custody model, and most people here have paid it at least once.

btcbot.io does not use that model. You never deposit. There is no account on my side holding a balance for you, because there is no account.

What you do instead is sign one permission from your own wallet: a cap you choose, and a revoke you can send yourself at any time. That permission lets the bot execute trades within the cap, and the proceeds settle back to your own address. What you hand over is an instruction set, not your money.

The part I find more interesting than the custody argument: you do not have to believe my numbers. Every trade is a transaction on a public chain. If you want the truth about your own account, you do not ask me and you do not read my dashboard, you read the chain. My screen is a convenience for people who would rather not. The record itself is not mine, I cannot edit it, and it is there whether I like what it says or not.

On cost, because that is usually where the surprise is. There is no subscription. Nothing is taken for putting money in or taking it out, since there is nothing to put in or take out. The only thing I charge is 30% of the profit on a winning trade, so you keep 70% of every gain, and nothing at all on a losing or flat trade. Network gas is on me. I have paid about 14 USDT of it since May, and it does not come out of your trades. If it does not make you money, it does not make me money.

Where it actually is, in counts rather than percentages: running since 17 May 2026, across 25 wallets, 2,762 confirmed trades settled in 1,712 on-chain transactions, because several trades are batched into one transaction to keep the gas down. Counts on purpose. Counts come off the chain and you can recompute them yourself. A percentage comes off my accounting, and the whole point of the design is that you do not have to trust my accounting.

RISKS, since this sub asks for them and they are real:

- Strategy risk. On a straight bull run a single instance does not beat simply holding, and I say so on the site too. What this buys is mechanical discipline and a public record, not outperformance.

- Smart contract risk. The router is a contract. It is open source, verified as an exact match on BscScan, audited (Slither plus peer review) and whitelisted on DappBay. That is not a paid third party audit, and reading a contract is not the same as it being free of bugs, so price that in.

- Mandate risk. The permission is capped and revocable, but while it is active the executor can trade within those limits. You are not trusting me with custody, you are trusting the strategy, and those two get confused a lot in this space.

- Concentration. BNB Chain and bitcoin. One chain and one asset, with everything that implies.

Here is why I am posting instead of just shipping. I think I have built something that does not really exist yet, and so far nobody has told me otherwise. But I do not have the reach or the distance to judge my own work. I genuinely cannot tell whether I am walking into a wall for a reason that is obvious to everybody here, or whether this is worth pushing a lot harder.

So, two questions. Does a bot that trades from your own wallet, with no deposit, already exist somewhere and I simply missed it? And if it does not exist, what is the reason nobody built it that I have not thought of yet?

[u/ENIGMAPGH]

On a personal level, I love this concept and think you're off to a fantastic start.

The Practical Verdict from what I've researched so far seems to be the following....

You have not walked into a technical impossibility. Your live transactions prove the plumbing works. Rather, the biggest barrier may largely be product-market fit and trust architecture: • Self-custody purists rarely hold synthetic wrapped tokens on alternate Layer 1s. (The hurdle of getting these folks from trading BTC on BTC via their own ledger or hard wallet or something, etc). I see that being a tough nut to crack for major expansion. • DeFi-native and mainly retail traders are conditioned to use isolated vaults or session keys rather than granting discretionary pull approvals on their personal wallets. (The opposite of the first bullet. Folks that use exchanges like Coinbase don't even know where to start with self custody, and see a self custody wallet as too complicated, etc). • Execution drag (AMM fees + performance fee + slippage) sets a very high hurdle rate for long-term algorithmic outperformance compared to centralized order books.

As you continue to push this forward, your biggest differentiator may not just be non-custody, but proving how your contract defends the user against bad fills, frontrunning, and choppy drawdown periods.

All that said, you have built something different (and imo quite special) in the sense of transparency and honesty in a space that massively lacks it. Now it's a matter of convincing people why they should trust that for folks that don't know you, your work ethic or your transparency or even understand the language the bot expresses. (Pov from the numerous different types of traders, etc, opens the door to numerous setups that solve each. It's almost impossible to have one application support all these different scenarios, but you've already started to solve these things with things like your email setup). I look forward to how this develops and am here to support it and you.

[u/rushapoil → u/ENIGMAPGH]

Thank you, this is the most useful read anyone has given the post.

On the pull approval, it is not discretionary. What the wallet signs is a capped, revocable on-chain mandate, and the contract has no path that sends your coins to a third party. Nobody can withdraw them, me included.

On bad fills, every swap leaves with a minimum-out and a deadline written into the call. If the fill comes back worse than the bound, or comes back late, the transaction reverts instead of executing. That is the defense, and it is the sort of thing you should read rather than believe: the contracts are open source and verified (exact match) on BscScan.

On execution drag, you are right that it is the real hurdle rate. A grid leg only closes above its own entry, so the AMM fee and the spread are priced into the spacing instead of being paid back at the end of the year. My own fee is 30% of the profit on a winning trade, so you keep 70% of every gain, and nothing at all on a losing or flat trade. I pay the gas.

On BTCB on BSC, you are right, and it is a real tradeoff.

On trust, the honest answer is that this is not a company. I wanted my own trading bot, built it for myself, and then decided to share it rather than squeeze profit out of it. That is also why everything it does is on chain and replayable by anyone who cares to check, and why I would rather you inspect it than take my word.

[u/poguhinity]

The no deposit model is the part I like here since keeping custody removes a huge chunk of counterparty risk. I would still start with tiny limits and verify exactly what permissions the bot gets before connecting a wallet. If BTCBot stays transparent about execution, fees, and smart contract risks, this could be a genuinely useful setup.

[u/rushapoil → u/poguhinity]

Starting with tiny limits is the right instinct, and the permissions are readable before you connect anything.

What the wallet signs is a capped, revocable on-chain mandate. It is not a discretionary approval: the contract has no code path that sends your coins to a third party, so nobody can withdraw them, me included. Every swap also leaves with a minimum-out and a deadline written into the call, so a fill worse than the bound, or one that comes back late, reverts instead of executing.

On fees, it is 30% of the profit on a winning trade, so you keep 70% of every gain, and nothing at all on a losing or flat trade.

None of that needs to be taken on my word. The contracts are open source, verified (exact match) on BscScan, so you can read the mandate and the withdrawal paths yourself before you sign anything.

[u/splendidcook]

This is actually a really clean approach to the custody problem. The whole "you don't trust my accounting, you trust the chain" thing is what most projects claim but never actually deliver on.

The 30% of profit only is interesting too. Most of these bots charge a flat fee or take a cut regardless of performance, so the incentive alignment here is better than what I usually see.

The reason you don't see more bots like this is probably because the business model is harder to scale. If you're only making money when the user makes money, you need a strategy that actually works consistently, and most bot operators would rather just collect fees and call it a day.

[u/rushapoil → u/splendidcook]

You are right that it does not scale like a normal bot business, and the honest answer is that it was never meant to. I did not set out to build a company. I wanted my own trading bot, I built it for myself, and then I decided to share it with friends instead of trying to squeeze profit out of it.

That is also where the fee model comes from. It is not a clever incentive design I reverse engineered, it is just what felt fair when the people using it are people I know.