Security

What holds your assets, what Astrid can and cannot do with them, and the limitations worth knowing before you trade.

Custody

Subnet alpha bought here is held by the Substrate account your EVM address maps to, derived as blake2_256("evm:" + address). That account has no private key of its own. The only way to move its balance is a transaction signed by the EVM address it was derived from.

Astrid holds nothing, and no contract of ours sits between you and your position. A subnet trade is a call from your wallet directly to the chain's own staking precompile.

Addresses

The staking precompile is part of the Subtensor runtime rather than a contract anyone deployed. StakingManager backs older pooled positions and is not used by new subnet trades.

How a trade is protected

• Trades carry an on-chain price limit. Buying and selling use the precompile's price-protected calls, so a trade cannot fill materially worse than quoted. Partial fills are allowed, so a move past the limit fills what still clears it rather than reverting.
• Quotes are priced from the chain. Pool reserves are read from Bittensor's own state rather than a market data provider, so the number an order is sized against is the number it settles at, and quoting keeps working when an indexer does not.

Known limitations

• Prices, charts and statistics still come from a third party. Trading does not depend on it: when it is unavailable the app says so, shows dashes rather than zeros, and the trade panel carries on quoting from the chain. But the market context around the trade will be missing.
• Borrowing carries liquidation risk that is independent of anything Astrid controls.
• A trade's price moves with its size. The limit protects you from the market moving, not from the impact of your own order, which is shown before you confirm.

Protecting yourself

• Check the price impact before confirming. On a thin subnet a modest order can move the price a long way, and that impact is yours: the slippage limit covers market movement, not your own order's.
• Confirm the network in your wallet before signing. Everything here settles on chain 964.
• Treat your Bittensor deposit address as belonging to that wallet only. Sending to it from an exchange is fine; sending assets that are not TAO on Bittensor is not.