Safety and risk
Two different questions: what can Helmsman do to your account, and what can the market do to it. Both answers are below.
In private testing: the trading engine is not live yet. The console you can open today shows sample data and nothing is traded. These pages describe how Helmsman is built to work.
What the trading key can and cannot do
It cannot
Withdraw or transfer funds. Approve other keys. Approve or raise fees. Touch anything outside Hyperliquid.
It can
Place and cancel orders. Set leverage and margin mode per market. Be revoked by you at any time, on Hyperliquid’s own site.
How the key is kept
A new key is generated for every approval and stored encrypted; it is decrypted only in the memory of the two processes that sign orders. The public-facing web server never has it. When you end Helmsman’s access or the key expires, it is disabled at once and permanently deleted within two days.
Helmsman never asks for your wallet’s private key or seed phrase. Any page that does is not Helmsman.
Revoking
Open app.hyperliquid.xyz → More → API and remove the key or the fee approval. From that moment Helmsman’s orders are rejected; it treats that as a normal exit and stops. You do not need Helmsman’s permission or its website to do this.
The risks that remain
- Leverage. Perpetual futures can lose your entire margin on a position. Isolated margin limits a liquidation to that one position; it does not prevent it.
- A closer liquidation price. Traders often use cross margin; your positions are isolated, so they can be liquidated at prices the trader survives. Setting your leverage cap below the trader’s helps.
- Latency. You trade after the trader, at a different price. In fast markets the difference can be large.
- The trader. Public positions show what someone did, not what they will do. A trader can lose everything, and the list is a selection, not an endorsement.
- Software and operations. Helmsman can fail. A separate safety process cancels orders if the engine goes silent, but no system is free of faults.