Getting started

Swapmos trades perpetual futures. A perp is a leveraged bet on an asset's price. There is no expiry date and you never own the underlying asset: you post USDC as margin, hold a position, and close it yourself or get liquidated. Depositing USDC does not buy you a token, it funds a margin account.

Three things have to happen before your first order: connect a wallet, enable trading, fund the account. The order ticket walks you through them in that order. Its single full-width button relabels itself at each stage: Get started, then Enable trading, then Add funds, then Long BTC / Short BTC. The same steps are available from the Account page header.

On phones and tablets there is no order ticket column. Use the floating Long / Short buttons pinned to the bottom of the screen, which open the full ticket as a sheet.

1. Connect a wallet

Use Get started in the top bar, on the empty Account page, or on the order ticket. It opens the wallet modal. Once connected, the top bar button stops being a button and becomes a link to /account showing your shortened address (0x1234…abcd).

Connecting proves you control an address. It does not create an account, and it does not move any funds.

2. Enable trading (two signatures)

Press Enable trading. Your wallet will prompt you twice, back to back. Both prompts are message signatures, not transactions: no gas, nothing sent on chain.

Signature 1 registers your Swapmos account. Your account ID is derived from your wallet address plus the Swapmos broker ID, so it is fixed before it exists and cannot be assigned to anyone else. Registration tells Swapmos that this address is now a live account under Swapmos. A wallet gets a separate account per builder, and those accounts are not linked to each other, so a balance on another venue will not appear here.

Signature 2 creates a trading key. Your browser generates a keypair, and this signature authorises it on your account. From then on, that key signs your orders. This is the whole reason there are two prompts: without it, every order, cancel and leverage change would need a wallet popup.

What the trading key can and cannot do:

• Scope is read,trading. It can place, cancel and read. It can never withdraw or move funds. Every withdrawal needs a fresh wallet signature.
• It lives in this browser's local storage only. It is never sent to a Swapmos server. Another browser, another device, or a cleared cache means signing again.
• It expires 30 days after you create it. When it expires it deletes itself and the button goes back to Enable trading.

Your balances belong to the Swapmos account derived from your wallet address, not to the key. Losing the key never loses funds.

The app picks the chain to sign on for you: your wallet's current network if Swapmos supports it, otherwise Arbitrum One. There is no setting for this.

3. Fund the account

Press Add funds on the ticket, or Deposit on the Account page. Deposits are USDC only, and are two on-chain transactions rather than an API call.

1. 1Pick a network. The row of circular logos is every chain Swapmos accepts. Clicking one switches your wallet's network, so the highlighted logo is always your wallet's actual chain. Hover a logo for its name and suggested minimum.
2. 2Enter an amount. Balance N beside the field fills in your entire wallet USDC balance.
3. 3Approve USDC. The button reads Approve USDC while the vault's allowance is below your amount. This is a standard ERC-20 approval.
4. 4Deposit. The button then reads Deposit and sends the USDC to the Swapmos vault on that chain.

Both transactions are simulated before your wallet is asked, so problems come back as one sentence instead of a raw revert. The common ones are "You need BNB on BNB Chain to pay for the transaction" and "That is more USDC than this wallet holds". Gas is paid in the chain's native token, not USDC, so you need a small amount of it on whichever network you choose.

Your balance appears roughly 8 seconds after the deposit confirms, because the exchange credits from the on-chain event rather than the receipt. A View transaction link is shown in the meantime.

About the minimum. Each network's tooltip shows a suggested minimum, calculated as three times that chain's withdrawal fee with a floor of 5 USDC. It is guidance, not a block: a smaller deposit will go through. The reason it exists is that getting the money out costs the same fee regardless of size, so a deposit near the fee is mostly consumed by the round trip.

After funding

The ticket button turns into Long BASE / Short BASE in green or red. Before placing anything, look at the Liq. price row in the ticket summary. Perps liquidate: at 100x leverage a 1% move against you removes your entire margin for that position. Leverage is set with the slider in the ticket and applies account-wide.

The Confirm checkbox in the ticket's flags row is on by default and shows a summary dialog before every order. Leave it on until the ticket is familiar.

Troubleshooting

• "Enable trading" came back. The key expired after 30 days, or storage was cleared, or you are on a different browser or device. Sign again. Positions, orders and balances are untouched.
• Deposit confirmed but the balance is still zero. Wait about 8 seconds and check the Balances tab. If it is still missing, open the View transaction link and confirm it succeeded on the right network.
• Requests rejected for no clear reason. the exchange rejects anything whose timestamp is more than 5 minutes from its server time. Check your device clock.
• Signing out is not the same as revoking. The sign-out button disconnects the wallet but leaves the trading key in this browser, and reconnecting the same wallet restores it. To actually remove the key, use Revoke trading key at the bottom of the Settings dialog on the Account page. Revoking does not close positions or cancel orders, and open positions can still be liquidated while you are signed out.