Welcome to Tessara

What is Tessara?

Tessara is an algorithmic trading bot — a computer program that automatically buys and sells cryptocurrency on your behalf, around the clock, without you needing to watch charts or make manual trades.

Think of it like having a tireless, disciplined trading assistant who never sleeps, never panics, never gets greedy, and follows a proven strategy every single time.

How the Bot Makes Money

Tessara uses a strategy called grid trading. Here's the simple version:

What Makes Tessara Special?

Onboarding — Getting Started

Setting up Tessara takes about 10 minutes. Here's exactly what happens in each step.

Step 1 — Connect Your Coinbase Account

You'll enter your Coinbase API key and API secret. An API key is like a special password that lets Tessara place trades on your behalf — without you needing to log in every time.

After saving, Tessara automatically connects and verifies your keys — it checks that they work and detects your Coinbase fee tier.

Step 2 — Fee Tier Detection

Coinbase charges a small fee on every trade. Your fee depends on your total trading volume over the past 30 days:

Tessara automatically adjusts your grid spacing so every trade is profitable at your fee tier. You don't need to do anything — it's automatic.

Step 3 — Your Capital & Risk Profile

Tell Tessara how much money you're starting with. This becomes your starting capital — the baseline used for all P&L and percentage calculations.

You'll also choose a risk profile:

Step 4 — Holdings Decision

If you already have crypto in Coinbase, Tessara asks what to do with each coin:

• Grid it — add it to the bot (Tessara places a protective sell order ~1.5% above your cost basis to lock in upside)
• Hold it — keep it as a passive holding, bot doesn't touch it
• Sell it — convert to USD so the bot can trade with that capital

Step 5 — Legal Acceptance & Launch!

Read and accept three short documents (Terms of Service, Privacy Policy, Risk Disclosure). Then click Launch — the bot starts immediately.

Safety & Risk — Read Before You Start

How Tessara Protects You

Key Things to Understand

1. USDC is never touched. The bot operates on USD only. Your USDC balance is completely separate and is never used for trading.
2. Grid bots work over time. Performance is measured in weeks and months, not individual days. Single-day results are not representative.
3. Settings have real consequences. Every setting in this guide has a direct effect on how the bot trades. The Settings Reference section explains each one.
4. Risk controls are not guarantees. Circuit breakers, stop-losses, and heat limits reduce exposure but cannot prevent losses in all market conditions.
5. Rotation can exit at a loss. If you enable the Rotation feature, the bot may deliberately close a position below your entry price. This is by design — see the Rotation section for full details.

Dashboard Overview

The Tessara dashboard is your command center. When you log in, you see a top bar with key metrics and a row of tabs at the top. Here's what everything means.

Top Summary Bar

The bar at the very top shows your most important numbers at a glance:

Overview Tab — Your Main Dashboard

The Overview is the first tab you land on. It's your at-a-glance command centre — all the important numbers and live activity in one place.

What's on the Overview

• Current Holdings — every coin the bot is currently holding, with live price, unrealized P&L, and position size. Click any coin to expand its card for full grid details and Smart Signals data.
• 🏆 Coin Performance table — a ranked table of every coin ever traded, ordered by profit per $100 deployed. Columns: Total P&L, Cycles, P&L per $100, Sharpe ratio, Win %, vs Hold (what buy-and-hold would have returned), Avg Fill time, ML Score, Consecutive Losses. Click column headers to sort. Coins with 50+ cycles and negative P&L are automatically penalised in discovery.
• Completed Trades feed — a live ticker of the most recent sell cycles as they happen.
• Recent Buy Fills — a live feed of incoming buy fills.
• Open Orders — a snapshot of pending limit orders across all grids.
• P&L chart — cumulative profit over time, togglable between bot-managed and total portfolio.
• 24h Coin Heatmap — colour-coded grid showing which coins are hot and which are cold in the last 24 hours.
• Market Conditions card — current BTC regime, Smart Signals health, buy pause status.

Positions Tab — Grid Management

The Positions tab shows all your active grid positions in a filterable, sortable card list — the working view for managing individual grids day-to-day.

Filter Bar

Sort Options

Sort positions by Name, Health score, P&L, Number of trades, or Grid spacing. Health is the most useful sort — it surfaces struggling grids at the top so you can review them first.

Position Card Actions

Each position card has quick actions: Pause/Resume, Remove (graceful drain), Re-enable (after a halt), and Set Tier (Normal → Elevated → Restricted). Expand the card to see all Smart Signals data.

Coins Tab — Discovery, Queue & Universe

The Coins tab is your hub for managing which coins the bot trades. It has four sub-sections you switch between using the nav bar at the top of the tab.

Summary Bar

At the very top: total active coins, pending queue count, average Signal Score across all active grids, and Watch List count (coins flagged for monitoring). Clicking any of these jumps to the relevant section.

The Four Sections

Orders Tab — All Open Limit Orders

The Orders tab gives you a full, real-time table of every open limit order across every grid — both buy-side and sell-side. It's the most granular view of what the bot has sitting on the exchange right now.

What Each Column Means

Filters

Filter by side (All / Buy only / Sell only) and by coin. Useful for checking how many buy orders are sitting in the market, or seeing how far your sell orders are from the current price.

History Tab — Every Trade Ever Made

The History tab is your complete trade ledger. Every buy and sell the bot has ever made is here, with full details.

What You'll See

• Coin — which coin was traded
• Buy price / Sell price — exactly what was paid and received
• Quantity — how much of the coin was bought/sold
• Net profit — profit after all fees
• Duration — how long the trade took from buy to sell
• Exit reason badge — why the position was closed (see table below)

Exit Reason Badges

Insights Tab — Deep Analytics

The Insights tab is your analytical cockpit. It goes beyond raw numbers to show you why the bot is performing the way it is — which features are helping, which market regimes are most profitable, and which coins to pay attention to.

Top Stats Cards

Feature Attribution Table

This is one of the most powerful and unique features in Tessara. It answers the question: "Is this feature actually making me money?"

For every bot behavior (Smart Signals, Trend Rider, overnight scale-down, etc.), it compares average profit per cycle when the feature was active vs when it wasn't. The Edge column shows the difference — positive Edge = the feature is helping you earn more per trade.

Regime P&L Table

Breaks down your trading performance by market regime: Ranging, Trending Up, Trending Down, Extreme Risk. Shows cycle count, average profit per cycle, and total P&L for each regime. Lets you see if the bot performs better in sideways markets vs trending ones (typically: ranging markets produce the most consistent cycles).

Top Coins This Week

A bar chart ranking your coins by profit generated in the past 7 days. Toggle between Total (absolute dollar amount) and Per Cycle (average profit per trade, adjusting for coins that trade more or less frequently). Per Cycle is often more telling — a coin that runs 100 cycles at $0.50 each is better than one that runs 3 cycles at $10 each.

Fill Heatmap

A 7-day × 24-hour grid coloured by average profit per hour. Reveals your most profitable trading windows. If Tuesday afternoon is always deep green, that's a pattern worth knowing — it might help you decide when to keep more grids active.

Performance Tab — Charts & Long-Term Tracking

The Performance tab gives you a deeper view of how well the bot is doing over time.

Key Metrics

• Cumulative P&L chart — how your total profit has grown over time (a healthy chart trends upward)
• Daily P&L bars — green bars for profitable days, red for down days
• Win Rate — what percentage of your completed trades were profitable
• Sharpe Ratio — a measure of risk-adjusted return (higher = better profit per unit of risk)
• Best/Worst day — your single best and worst trading day
• By Regime — how the bot performed in different market conditions (Ranging, Trending Up, Trending Down)

Coin Performance Table

This table ranks every coin you've ever traded by total profit, win rate, number of cycles, and Sharpe ratio. Use it to see which coins are your star performers — and which ones might not be worth having in your portfolio.

Universe Tab — Live Trading Visualization

The Universe tab is the most visually striking part of Tessara. It's a real-time, animated visualization of all your active trades — like looking at a living star map of your portfolio.

Each coin appears as a node. When the bot makes a trade — a buy fills, a sell fills, a new grid starts — you see it animate live. It's not just eye candy: it's a genuinely useful way to see at a glance which coins are active and how much trading activity is happening.

Universe Modes

• Grid view — shows all active coins and their current status
• Activity view — animated ticker of recent fills as they happen
• Rotation view — when Smart Signals rotates capital, you see an animated bridge from the exited coin to the new one

Arena Tab — Gamification & Community

The Arena turns trading into a game. It won't make you a better trader on its own — but it makes the experience more engaging, competitive, and fun. Here's everything in it:

Bot Level & XP

Your bot earns XP (Experience Points) as it makes profitable trades. The more profit it generates over its lifetime, the higher its level. Your level is displayed on your profile and leaderboard entry.

Daily Quests

Every day at midnight ET, you get 3 fresh quests. Complete them to earn FP (Floor Points) — the Arena currency. Quest categories:

• Aggressive — high activity quests (e.g., "Complete 20 cycles today")
• Resilient — endurance quests (e.g., "Maintain a 90%+ win rate for 24 hours")
• Chaotic — wild card quests (e.g., "Trade a coin you've never traded before")

Achievement Codex

There are 110+ achievements to unlock — from first cycle to 1000 cycles, from earning your first dollar to hitting a $10,000 milestone, from surviving a market crash to setting a single-day record. Each achievement gives bonus FP and a badge on your profile.

Hall of Printers

The leaderboard — see how your bot ranks against other Tessara users by total profit, win rate, or daily performance. Two views: All Time and Today (resets at midnight ET).

Bot Racing League

Adopt one of Tessara's community bots and track their performance. Each community bot has a different trading style and personality. Follow their wins, root for your chosen bot, and earn FP from their performance. Your adopted bot's skin and voice lines unlock as you bond with it (earn XP together).

Today's Beef

A daily rivalry vote between two coins or two bots. Make your prediction — correct calls earn +2 FP. It's a fun way to develop market intuition without risking any real money.

Night Recap

Between 10pm and 4am, the dashboard shows a special Night Recap card summarizing your day: top performing coin, total cycles, P&L, big wins, and any notable events. A nice way to wind down and review what the bot accomplished while you slept.

Buff Shop

Spend your FP on cosmetics and boosts in the Buff Shop. 35+ items across four categories:

• Temp Buffs — limited-time effects (e.g., doubled XP for 24 hours)
• Titles — profile title badges ("The Printer," "Diamond Hands," "Night Owl")
• Auras — visual effects on your bot cards
• Voice Packs — change the sounds and voice lines for trade notifications
• Special — rare seasonal items

Referral Program

Share your personal referral link (found in the Arena tab). When a friend joins via your link and gets approved: you both get +25 FP.

Billing Tab — Your Tessara Invoice

The Billing tab shows exactly what you owe Tessara and your full invoice history. It's separate from the Finance tab (which is for your own business accounting).

How Billing Works

• Fee: 10% of net realized profit per month
• Minimum: $5 when profitable. $0 on a losing or flat month — you never pay when the bot doesn't make money.
• Cap: $149.99 maximum per month
• Billing date: 1st of each month via Stripe
• Grace period: 7 days after the invoice is issued before the bot pauses

What You See on the Billing Tab

• Billing Status — current state: Active, Trial, Invoice pending, Paused
• This Month card — net realized P&L this month and the estimated fee you'll owe on the 1st
• Pay Now banner — shown in red if you have an outstanding invoice. Click to pay via Stripe. The bot pauses 7 days after an invoice is issued if unpaid.
• Billing History — every past invoice with amount, date, and payment status

Finance Tab — Capital Tracking & Tax Tools

The Finance tab helps you track the business side of trading. Useful for taxes and understanding your true return on investment.

Capital Ledger

A running record of all deposits and withdrawals. The bot uses this to calculate your true return on investment (ROI) — not just profit, but profit relative to how much you've put in.

Recurring Expenses

Log ongoing expenses (VPS hosting, API subscriptions, Tessara subscription) with DUE reminders so you never miss a bill.

Quarterly Tax Estimates

Based on your trading profit, Tessara estimates your quarterly federal and state tax liability. Useful for setting money aside — crypto profits are taxable in the US.

P&L Statement

A formal profit-and-loss statement showing gross profit, fees paid, expenses, and net income. Exportable for your accountant.

Billing

Tessara charges 10% of realized profit, billed on the 1st of each month via Stripe. Minimum $5. The Billing tab shows exactly which trades are billable (bot-placed trades only — not prior holdings or protective sells from onboarding).

Logs Tab — What the Bot is Actually Doing

The Logs tab gives you a live stream of the bot's internal activity — every decision, every order placed, every fill received, every error. It's the most powerful diagnostic tool for understanding exactly what's happening under the hood.

Reading the Logs

Logs stream in real time (Live mode). Each line is prefixed with a timestamp and an emoji indicating the type of event:

Filter Box

The filter input at the top searches log lines in real time. Useful searches:

• BTC — show only Bitcoin-related log lines
• 💰 — show only completed trade events
• error — show only error lines
• PAUSE — show buy pause events
• GRID-XRP — show all activity for XRP specifically

Line Count & Live Toggle

• Live checkbox — when checked, new log lines appear automatically as they happen. Uncheck if you want to scroll without the view jumping.
• Line count selector — choose 100, 200, or 500 lines. More lines = more history but slower to load.
• Refresh button — manually re-fetch the latest logs.

Settings Tab — Your Control Panel

The Settings tab is where you configure how the bot behaves. Don't change settings randomly — read this section to understand what each one does before touching it.

Core Concepts — Grid Bot Explained

Let's go deeper on how the grid actually works in practice.

Grid Spacing

This is the most important parameter. It controls how far apart the buy and sell orders are placed, expressed as a percentage.

• Narrower spacing (e.g., 0.4%) = more cycles per day, more profit in stable markets, but higher risk in volatile ones
• Wider spacing (e.g., 1.5%) = fewer cycles, more resilient to big swings, lower profit in calm markets

Tessara automatically calculates the minimum safe spacing for your fee tier, and uses volatility-adaptive spacing — when a coin gets more volatile, it widens the spacing automatically to avoid getting caught in a whipsaw.

Position Size

How much USD goes into each buy order. Controlled by the Grid Slot Size setting. If your slot is $400 and you have 20 active grids, the bot tries to keep $8,000 deployed (40 × $200 = $8,000 average).

Grid Count (Target Grids)

The target number of coins to trade simultaneously. More grids = more diversification = smoother returns. Too many grids with too little capital = each position is very small. A good rule of thumb: Capital ÷ Grid Slot ≈ Target Grids.

P&L, Cycles & Win Rate

What is P&L?

P&L stands for Profit and Loss. It's the money you've made (positive) or lost (negative) after all fees.

Two Types of P&L

• Bot-Managed P&L — profit from trades the bot placed. This is the "pure" performance number.
• Total Portfolio P&L — includes the change in value of any crypto you held before Tessara started. Can be misleading if you had existing holdings that dropped in price.

Realized vs Unrealized

• Realized P&L — money you've actually made from completed sell orders. This is real money in your account.
• Unrealized P&L — the paper gain or loss on positions you're currently holding. This number fluctuates with price — it's not real until the position closes.

Win Rate

The percentage of completed cycles that were profitable. Tessara's target is above 90%. Note: this is calculated only on bot-placed billable trades (not protective sells or prior holdings).

Discovery & Rotation

How the Bot Finds Coins

The AI system continuously scans a universe of 70+ coins on Coinbase and scores each one using a Machine Learning (ML) model that considers:

• Recent price volatility (more volatility = more grid cycles possible)
• Trading volume (needs enough liquidity to fill orders cleanly)
• Historical Sharpe ratio on this coin
• Current sector balance (so you're not overloaded with meme coins, for example)

Discovery Queue Flow

1. Bot scores a coin as worth trading → coin appears in Discovery Queue
2. If Auto Discover is ON → automatically approved and grid starts
3. If Auto Discover is OFF → you manually review and approve/reject
4. Bot monitors performance — underperformers are placed on "probation" and eventually removed if they don't improve

What is Rotation?

Rotation is when the bot replaces one coin with a better one. This can happen automatically (via Smart Signals) or manually (you remove one coin and add another). The goal: always have your best coins active at any given time.

Market Regimes

Tessara watches Bitcoin's price action and classifies the current market into four regimes:

Smart Signals — AI-Powered Intelligence Layer

Smart Signals is an advanced intelligence layer built on top of the grid trading engine. It makes the bot smarter about when to buy more and when to exit positions.

Signal Score — Smarter Entry Sizing

ON by default

Before every buy order, the bot calculates a Signal Score from 0 to 100 based on four real-time signals:

The score drives how much the bot buys:

What is CVD?

CVD (Cumulative Volume Delta) measures whether more dollars are flowing into a coin from buyers vs sellers at any given moment. Think of it as the "pressure gauge" for a coin:

• Positive CVD → more buyers than sellers → bullish pressure → good time to buy more
• Negative CVD → more sellers than buyers → bearish pressure → buy less or wait

The bot monitors CVD over the last 15 minutes and 2 hours for every active coin. It takes 2 hours of warmup data before CVD produces a reliable signal — during warmup, the bot uses a neutral score.

Automatic Buy Pause — Portfolio-Wide Safety Brake

ON by default

When multiple market signals deteriorate at the same time, the bot automatically halts all new buy orders. This protects you from buying into a falling market.

Two Alert Levels

What both modes do:

• Cancel all open buy orders immediately
• Stop all new buy orders
• Let existing sell orders, trailing stops, and rotation exits continue normally
• Capital accumulates as cash until conditions improve

You can always manually override: click Force Resume on the dashboard banner. The pause self-resolves automatically once signals clear — no action needed from you.

Relative Strength Rotation — Capital Optimization

OFF by default

The bot continuously ranks every coin you're holding by how it's performing compared to Bitcoin. The weakest coin is always the first candidate to be replaced if something better comes along.

How Rotation Triggers

All four conditions must be true simultaneously:

1. A new coin's Signal Score is above the rotation threshold (minimum 55)
2. Your weakest current coin is underperforming BTC by more than the exit threshold
3. That weak coin has been held for at least 2 hours (no panic exits)
4. Your portfolio isn't already down more than 6% today (rotations pause on rough days)

Anti-Churn Safeguards

Four independent systems prevent the bot from churning (rotating too fast and losing money):

• Rotation losses are capped at 2% of portfolio per day
• After 3 consecutive rotation losses of 2%+, rotations pause 12 hours
• The worse the exit loss, the higher the required score on the new coin
• Hard cap of 12 rotations per day

Protected Coins

BTC and ETH require twice the normal weakness threshold before they can be rotated out. You can also manually protect any coin in Settings — a protected coin shows a 🔒 icon in its card.

Conviction Decay — Exiting Stale Positions

OFF by default

Every position starts with a conviction score of 100. If it stays underwater (below your buy price) with no signs of recovery, that conviction slowly decays. When it decays enough, the position becomes eligible for rotation — even without a better coin to rotate into.

Decay is dynamic — it goes faster when the coin also has weak order flow and is underperforming BTC (triple confirmation of trouble), and slower when the coin shows positive buying pressure despite being underwater.

The score fully resets on a green daily close or when price recovers near your cost basis.

Correlation Limits — Avoiding Overconcentration

OFF by default

Some coins move together — meme coins (DOGE, SHIB, PEPE) tend to all rise and fall together. DeFi tokens do the same. If 10 of your 20 active grids are meme coins, a meme coin crash wipes half your portfolio simultaneously.

Correlation Limits prevents this by identifying clusters of correlated coins and capping any one cluster at 25% of deployed capital by default. The bot figures out the clusters automatically from price data — no manual setup needed.

Settings — Core Grid Settings

These settings control the fundamental behavior of every grid the bot runs.

Settings — Risk Controls

Settings — Discovery Settings

Settings — Smart Signals

Settings — Notifications

Settings — Advanced Settings

These settings are for power users. If you're in your first 30 days, don't touch these.

Daily Workflow — What to Check Every Day

You don't need to watch the bot constantly — it works while you sleep. But a 5-minute daily check keeps you informed and helps you catch anything that needs attention.

Morning Check (5 minutes)

Weekly Review

• Performance tab — 7-day P&L chart and cumulative trend
• Coin Performance table — profit per $100, win rate, and Sharpe ratio per coin
• Consecutive losses column — highlights coins the auto-cull system is tracking
• Rotation History — if rotation is on, shows every automatic exit with the reason logged
• Finance tab → Capital — verify the ledger reflects any deposits or withdrawals made

Monthly Review

• Tessara invoice auto-delivered on the 1st via Stripe — payment link is on the Billing tab
• Performance data is exportable from the History tab (CSV) for record-keeping
• Starting Capital field in Settings — update if your deposited balance has changed

Reading the Dashboard — Key Signals

Things Worth Knowing

How Settings Interact

• Slot size × target grid count determines total deployed capital. Changing either affects how much of your balance the bot uses.
• Risk profile is a multiplier on both spacing and position size — changing it affects every active grid immediately.
• Risk protection settings (circuit breaker, per-coin stop, heat threshold) work as independent layers. Each can fire separately.
• Smart Signals settings interact — Conviction Decay only does something when Rotation is also on.

Understanding the Data

• Bot-Managed P&L is the most meaningful performance metric — it excludes prior holdings and pre-launch fills.
• Win rate is calculated on bot-placed billable cycles only. Protective sells and orphan recoveries are excluded from the denominator.
• Unrealized P&L fluctuates with market prices and is not settled until a position closes.
• Capital Ledger in the Finance tab feeds the ROI% calculations — keep it updated after deposits and withdrawals.

Settings Changes

• Settings changes take effect on the next bot action — they do not retroactively alter open orders.
• Risk profile changes apply immediately to position sizing on new buys but do not resize existing open positions.
• Enabling rotation means the bot may exit positions at a loss — read the Rotation section of this guide before enabling it.
• The Export Settings button in Settings saves a JSON snapshot of your current configuration, which can be re-imported if needed.

Troubleshooting & Common Questions

Power User Features

Manual Coin Addition

Even if the ML system hasn't discovered a coin, you can add it manually:

1. Go to the Coins tab → Available Universe
2. Find the coin you want
3. Click Add to Portfolio

Or use the Settings tab → Manual Coin Selection to add a coin by typing its ticker. The bot will start trading it like any other grid, using your current slot size and risk settings.

Bulk Actions

In the Coins tab, you can select multiple coins and apply an action to all of them at once:

• Bulk Remove — start draining multiple coins simultaneously
• Bulk Pause — temporarily pause buy order placement on multiple coins
• Bulk Re-enable — bring multiple halted grids back online at once

Rotation Suggestions

Even with auto-rotation off, the bot shows manual rotation suggestions in the Coins tab — coins it thinks would be worth rotating into based on current signal scores. You can review and act on these at your own pace without enabling automatic rotation.

Walk-Forward Backtester (Admin)

For admin users, the Admin tab includes a walk-forward backtester — run your current settings against historical data to see how they would have performed. Useful for evaluating settings changes before applying them live.

Withdrawals

The Withdraw button is in the top summary bar. Two modes:

• Patient Withdrawal — waits for open sell orders to fill naturally, then returns cash. Minimal market impact. Recommended.
• Immediate Withdrawal — cancels open orders and market-sells positions immediately. Use only when you need the cash urgently.

Export Settings

In Settings, you can export all your settings as a JSON file. Useful for backing up your configuration before making major changes — you can re-import it if needed.

API Sessions Management

The Settings tab shows all active login sessions. If you see a session you don't recognize, revoke it immediately. You can also revoke all sessions at once to force a re-login everywhere.

Glossary — Every Term Explained