Exchanges

Before deploying a bot with real capital, use plutarc's built-in Backtester to validate your strategy against historical market data. The backtester simulates trades using real candle data from your chosen exchange and symbol, giving you performance metrics, equity curves, and trade-by-trade breakdowns — all without risking any funds.

plutarc only needs the ability to place and cancel orders.

BybitBinanceKrakenOKXKuCoinDeribitGeminiPhemexWooXBitget

• Trade → Read-Write — enable this. Enable for Derivatives. Required for your bot to place and cancel orders.
• Withdraw — never enable this. plutarc does not need withdrawal access and will never request it.

plutarc exclusively trades perpetual contracts (perps) — derivatives that track the price of an asset with no expiry date. Perps support leverage, long and short positions, and margin-based trading.

When trading derivatives, you also choose a contract typethat determines how margin and P&L are calculated:

If you're unsure which to use, start with linear contracts— they're more straightforward and the P&L is easier to track.

Kraken — Candle Data Polling

Kraken Futures does not provide a real-time WebSocket candle feed. plutarc polls Kraken's REST API every 60 seconds to update candle data. As a result, signal calculations on Kraken may lag behind real-time market conditions by up to 60 seconds. Strategies relying on precise entry timing or short-term price action — including scalping strategies — are not recommended for Kraken deployments. Longer timeframe strategies (1h, 4h, 1d) are largely unaffected by this limitation.

Gemini — Data Limitations

Gemini does not provide a real-time WebSocket candle feed. plutarc polls Gemini's REST API every 60 seconds to update candle data, so signal calculations on Gemini may lag behind real-time market conditions by up to 60 seconds — strategies relying on precise entry timing or short-term price action, including scalping, are not recommended for Gemini deployments; longer timeframe strategies (1h, 4h, 1d) are largely unaffected. Gemini also does not surface funding-rate or open-interest data, so strategy components that depend on those signals are unavailable on Gemini.

Kraken — Trailing Stops

Kraken Futures supports trailing stops natively, however they are not available through the Kraken API. plutarc implements trailing stops in software within the bot process as a result. Trailing stop state is held in memory — if a bot is stopped or restarted while a trailing stop is active, the trailing stop level will be recalculated from the current price on restart rather than preserved from before the stop.

Deribit — Implicit Leverage

Deribit does not support setting leverage per-position via its API. Instead, leverage is determined implicitly by the ratio of position size to available margin — a larger position relative to your margin means higher effective leverage. The leverage value configured in plutarc is used only to cap position size against available margin (positions themselves are sized by your Risk per trade setting) and is not sent to the exchange. Deribit does enforce a maximum effective leverage per instrument, which is shown in the dashboard and validated when configuring assets.

Common issues when connecting your exchange to plutarc:

• Invalid API key — double-check that you copied the full key and secret without trailing spaces. Ensure the key hasn't expired or been revoked on the exchange.
• Insufficient permissions — verify that Order permissions are enabled on the exchange side.
• IP restriction blocked — if you enabled IP whitelisting, make sure plutarc's IP ranges are included.
• Wrong market or contract type — the market type and contract type in plutarc must match the instruments available under your API key.

For more help, see the Troubleshooting page.