What is a grid bot?

How a grid bot works

You give the bot three things: a range (the highest and lowest price you want it to operate between), a number of levels to split that range into, and the capital it is allowed to use. The bot divides the range into evenly spaced price lines — the grid — and treats every line below the current price as a place to buy, and every line above it as a place to sell.

From then on it is mechanical. Price falls to a line, the bot buys. Price rises to the next line up, the bot sells what it bought there. The difference between the two lines, minus fees, is the profit on that round trip. Nothing about the strategy tries to predict direction — it only reacts to movement that has already happened.

A worked example

Say you set a range of $90 to $110 with ten levels, so the lines sit roughly $2 apart. Price is at $100. The bot holds buy orders at $98, $96, $94 and so on, and sell orders at $102, $104, $106.

• Price dips to $98 — the bot buys one level's worth.
• Price recovers to $100 — the bot sells that same portion, capturing about $2 per unit, minus fees.
• Price keeps falling to $94 — the bot buys three times on the way down and is now holding more of the asset than it started with.
• Price climbs back to $100 — those three positions are sold off one line at a time, each for a step of profit.

The numbers above are an illustration of the mechanic, not a return figure. How much a grid actually earns depends entirely on how often price crosses your lines, and no one can tell you that in advance.

When grids work, and when they don't

A grid bot is paid by volatility and punished by trend. This is the single most important thing to understand before running one, and it is the part most marketing leaves out.

Where grids do well

• Choppy, range-bound markets. Price oscillates between a floor and a ceiling. Every swing crosses lines, and every crossing is a trade.
• High volatility without direction. Violent moves that keep returning to the middle are close to the ideal case.
• Markets you would have traded by hand. The bot's real edge is that it is awake at 4am and does not change its mind.

Where grids struggle

• A sustained downtrend. The bot buys the whole way down, spending its capital, and ends up holding an asset worth less than it paid. This is the way grid traders actually lose money — not through a bug, but by design working exactly as specified.
• A sustained uptrend. The bot sells into the rally, runs out of inventory near the top of its range, and then watches. You keep the grid profit but underperform simply holding.
• A range set too wide or too narrow. Too wide and price rarely crosses a line, so nothing happens. Too narrow and price leaves the range almost immediately and the bot idles.
• Thin liquidity. If each trade moves the market against you, slippage can eat the spread between two lines. Grids need a market deep enough for the step size you chose.

A grid bot is not a yield product and it is not passive income. It is a trading strategy with a specific shape of risk, and it can lose money.

The jargon, translated

Custodial and non-custodial grid bots

Most grid bots are features of a centralised exchange or a service you deposit into. To trade for you, they hold your funds. That is a real and separate risk from whether the strategy works: exchanges have frozen withdrawals, been hacked, and failed, and in each case the strategy's performance stopped being the thing that mattered.

A non-custodial grid bot is built the other way around. Your funds sit in a smart contract vault that you own. The bot is granted permission to trade inside limits you set, and nothing more — it can swap through a pinned router, and it cannot move funds out. Withdrawal is restricted to the owner's wallet by the contract itself, not by a promise.

The trade-off is honest: you are trusting audited-or-not contract code and your own key management instead of a company. But the failure modes are visible on a block explorer, and no operator can decide to stop letting you out.

What to check before running one

1. Who can withdraw? If the answer is anyone other than you, you are taking counterparty risk on top of market risk.
2. What are the total fees? Count the platform fee, the DEX or exchange fee, and network fees — per trade. A grid does a lot of small trades, so a fee that looks trivial once is not trivial a hundred times.
3. What stops a bad trade? Look for a slippage cap, a maximum trade size, and a daily limit. A bot with no ceiling on what it can do in a day is a bot you have to watch.
4. Where does the price come from? A bot that reads price from a single thin pool can be pushed around. An oracle or a sanity check against an independent source is what prevents it.
5. What happens when it goes down? If the service stops, can you get your funds out yourself, without them?
6. Is the code audited?Ask, and treat "not yet" as a reason to start small rather than a reason to walk away — but ask.

How Grid Master runs grids

Grid Master is a non-custodial implementation of the strategy above, running on Solana and on Robinhood Chain. Your capital goes into a vault contract you own. A keeper watches the market and triggers the swaps when price crosses one of your lines, so nothing has to stay running on your machine.

• Only you can withdraw. Enforced by the vault contract. The keeper can trigger swaps through a pinned router and can never move funds out. How custody works.
• Risk caps are on-chain. Per-trade size, a daily limit, and a slippage ceiling bound every trade the keeper can make. Built-in safety features.
• Grid is one of four strategies. DCA, Accumulation and Glide run on the same vault model when a grid is not what you want. Compare the strategies.
• No subscription. Grid Master takes a 0.20%platform fee on each executed trade, plus a one-time on-chain fee when a vault is created. The DEX fee of the route goes to the liquidity providers, and gas for the vault's trades is paid by our keeper rather than by you. Fee details in the FAQ.

Comparing grid bot platforms

The strategy is the same everywhere; what differs is who holds your funds, how you are charged, and what stops a bad trade. These pages take one competing approach each and say plainly where it wins.

Running a grid on each chain

The chain decides what a grid costs to run, which pairs exist to run it on, and what protects a trade. These two pages cover the chains Grid Master runs on.

Keep reading