3Commas: How It Works and Where It Can Fail

How the setup fits together

As we understand it, 3Commas sits between you and a crypto exchange. You open the account at the exchange and your coins stay there. You then create an API key, a pair of codes issued by the exchange, and give it to the service. From then on the service can send orders to the exchange, within whatever permissions you ticked when the key was made.

That makes three parties, and each is a place for things to go wrong. The exchange can have an outage, change a rule or freeze withdrawals. The service can have a bug, a breach or a changed bot. You can leave a key too loose, type a size wrong, or leave a bot running while you look elsewhere.

The bot types the service is described as offering, grid and DCA among them, are sets of rules. A grid keeps buy and sell orders at price steps through a range. A DCA bot buys in stages as the price falls. Neither has any view on whether the market is about to fall further. Our guides on grid trading and the DCA bot cover the mechanics.

We say "as we understand it" on purpose. We have not run the service. We name it so that people searching for it land on a plain explanation, and what it charges, which exchanges it supports and which bots it offers today are for the vendor's own pages.

Five places an API-key bot service can fail

1. The key is too powerful or too exposed. A key that can only trade still lets whoever holds it place orders on your account. A key that can also withdraw is a far bigger problem. Ask for the least permission that works, limit it to a list of IP addresses if the exchange allows that, and know exactly where on the exchange you delete it.
2. The bot does what you typed, not what you meant. A size entered in the wrong box, or a step of 2 where you wanted 0.2, is carried out faithfully. Read the summary screen as if somebody else had filled it in.
3. The balance runs out halfway up the ladder. If the next order needs more than the account holds, it cannot be placed, and the ladder stops part built. The example below shows how easily several bots arrive there together.
4. The connection drops. If the service loses contact with the exchange, or the exchange is down, orders already resting on the exchange may stay put while the bot cannot adjust them. What you hold afterwards may not be what you planned.
5. The dashboard tells a tidier story than the exchange. A service's own totals are its record of what happened. They may leave out some fees or count gains that are not yet realised. The exchange's order history and statements are the check.

Worked example: three bots, one account

Every number here is made up. It is not a 3Commas setting and not a price. An account holds $2,000. Over time you start three bots on it, each sensible on its own. For each, the figure that matters is the money it needs if every one of its steps fills, because a ladder only works if the whole ladder can be funded.

The three bots together need $2,166.56 on an account of $2,000. That is $166.56 more than the account holds, so the last steps of the later ladders could never be placed. No single bot looked reckless. The problem only shows when the three worst cases are added, and a settings screen for one bot does not add them for you.

It is tempting to say all three will never run to the bottom of their ladders at once. If the three trade coins that tend to fall together, though, their buy steps tend to fill together, and in a sharp fall that is the case that matters. Adding the worst cases is the honest sum.

Calculated by us on 3 Nov 2026, exact. If you run bots on one account, make this sum yourself with your own settings. The DCA calculator and the grid calculator give each bot's figure.

Seven questions to settle before a key is handed over

• What is the smallest permission the key needs, and can I make it trading-only?
• Where exactly do I delete the key on the exchange, and have I found that screen already?
• What do all my bots add up to if every step fills, against the balance on that account?
• At what loss will I switch each bot off, and is that number written down?
• What does the service do when it loses contact with the exchange, and where is that stated?
• Which of the service's figures can I tie to the exchange's own statement?
• Does the key sit on an account that holds only what I can afford to lose?

For how to read key permissions in code you run yourself, see open source crypto trading bots. For why a vendor's own results are the vendor's choice of what to show, see survivorship bias.

What this page does not say

It makes no claim about how well 3Commas works, how safe it is or how it compares with anything else. The figures are invented to show how worst cases add up. Crypto-assets and leveraged products can lose all the money put into them, and past or simulated results are not a guide to future results.