Setting up a run, screen by screen
Most guides to volume tooling are written for people who already know what the fields mean. This desk goes the other way. One screen at a time, one field at a time: what the box wants, what the number changes, which decision it quietly forces on you, and what the panel does the moment you press start.
What a setup form asks for
- token mint
- The address of the token you want traded, copied from a block explorer rather than from a chat message.
- venue
- Which curve or pool every swap is routed through, because one token can trade in more than one place.
- wallet count
- How many separate addresses send the trades, which sets the overhead you pay before a single swap lands.
- swap size
- How much each individual trade moves, measured against how deep the venue actually is.
- budget cap
- The spend the panel is allowed to reach before it stops itself without asking you again.
- duration
- The window the work is spread across, which decides pacing far more than it decides totals.
The five things every setup screen makes you decide
Panels differ in wording and layout, but the decisions underneath them are the same five, in roughly this order. If you can answer these, you can fill in any version of the form.
Which wallet pays
A funding wallet you are willing to expose, holding only what the run is allowed to spend. Never the wallet that holds everything else you own.
Which token
A mint address, pasted in full and checked character by character against an explorer. Ticker symbols are not unique and are not what the field wants.
Which venue
A bonding curve before migration, a pool after it. The choice changes the fee, the depth and how visible each trade looks in the transaction list.
How big and how many
Swap size against pool depth, wallet count against the overhead each new address adds. These two numbers set the floor under the whole cost of the run.
When it stops
A budget cap, a duration, or both. Decide the stopping condition before you start, because deciding it while a run is live is how budgets get overshot.
Featured walkthroughs
Four pages that cover the run from an empty form to a finished report. Each one opens with the single sentence that answers its own question, so you can skip anything you already know.
Setting up a run
Setting up a run means filling one form: a token, a venue, a wallet count, a swap size, a budget cap and a duration, then reading the confirmation screen before anything is signed. The full sequence from an empty panel to a running job, with a reference table for every field on the form and the arithmetic behind a first small run. Walkthrough 01 Open this guideConnecting a wallet
A panel touches your wallet in one of three ways, and only one of them is safe to do casually: connect and sign, deposit to an address, or hand over a key you should never hand over. The three custody patterns behind a connect button, how to read a signature request before approving it, and the requests that are always a theft attempt. Walkthrough 02 Open this guideWallets and swap size
Wallet count decides how many separate addresses send the trades and how much SOL is locked up in overheads; swap size decides how much each trade moves the pool. Two numbers that set the cost floor of a run, with the funding arithmetic worked in full and a table of what changes when you move each one. Field guide 02 Open this guideReading the report
A run report has three parts: header totals, a per-transaction log with a status on every line, and a cost breakdown; the status column is the part worth reading first. Every line of a finished run explained, why attempted and landed volume differ, and how to check the panel against a block explorer without trusting either. Walkthrough 03 Open this guideTwo ways into the material
Read the walkthroughs if you are about to do this for the first time and want the sequence. Read the field guides if you are already staring at a form and one specific box is stopping you.
Walkthroughs
The whole run in order: opening the panel, connecting a wallet without handing over anything you cannot take back, filling the form, and reading the report the panel writes when it finishes.
Settings
One field at a time, with the consequence spelled out: token and venue pickers, wallet count and swap size, budget caps and duration. Each guide ends with the checks worth doing before you save.
When a run stops and you do not know why
Three of the questions people send most often, answered short. Twelve more sit on the questions page, all of them about operating a panel rather than about the theory behind it.
Why did my run stop early?
Almost always a limit doing its job: the budget cap was reached, the duration expired, or the funding wallet ran out of SOL for fees. The report header names which one ended it.
Can I close the browser tab?
It depends on where the work runs. If the panel executes on a server it keeps going; if it executes in the page, closing the tab ends it. Check before you walk away, not after.
Why is the panel total different from the explorer?
A panel counts what it attempted and what it landed. An explorer counts what confirmed on chain. The gap between the two is the failure rate, and it is worth looking at.
What the panel is doing while it runs
Once the confirmation screen is behind you, the interesting part of the screen is the log. The panel is building one transaction at a time, signing it with a worker wallet, sending it to an RPC endpoint and waiting to hear whether it landed. Most of what looks like activity is that loop repeating, with retries stacked in between.
Nothing about that loop is dramatic, and none of it is hidden from you. Every line it writes has an equivalent on a block explorer, which is why the last walkthrough on this site is about reconciling the two rather than trusting either on its own.
See a live panelWhat the log is telling you
- Queued: the panel has decided a trade should happen but has not built it yet.
- Sent: a signed transaction has gone to an endpoint and the panel is waiting for confirmation.
- Landed: the transaction confirmed, and the swap counts towards the totals in the header.
- Failed: the transaction was rejected, usually for slippage, expiry or a missing balance.
- Retried: the same intent was rebuilt and sent again, which costs fees whether or not it lands.
- Stopped: a cap, a duration or you ended the run, and the panel is finishing what is in flight.
How these walkthroughs are written
A short method, because it has to hold up on every page. It also explains the things you will not find here.
Patterns, not photographs
We describe what a field is for and what it changes. We do not claim to be documenting any particular product's exact screen, because layouts move between releases and a stale screenshot is worse than no screenshot.
The consequence is part of the instruction
A step that tells you what to type but not what it changes is half a step. Every field on this site is written as a pair: what you enter, and what happens differently because you entered it.
No key ever leaves your hands
No page here asks you to paste a seed phrase, a private key or a keypair file into anything. Where a workflow would need one, we say why that request is the end of the conversation.
Arithmetic shown in full
Where a number appears it is either a protocol constant you can verify, or an illustrative calculation with every input named. We publish no performance figures, no success rates and no ratings.
No promised outcome
Nothing here tells you what a run will achieve. A panel can produce transactions; whether anyone notices them is decided by other people's software and is outside what any setup guide can promise.
Corrections are cheap
If a field has been renamed, a step has gone stale or an explanation is simply wrong, tell the desk and it gets fixed. That is the entire editorial process and there is a page for it.