How to Secure Exchange API Keys for Crypto Trading Bots
If you run any kind of automated trading — a simple rebalancing script, a grid bot, or a full strategy engine — you cannot avoid the exchange API key. It is the credential that lets your code move money. Functionally, it belongs to the same family as a database password or a cloud account key, and it deserves the same discipline: grant the minimum permission necessary, and nothing more. This guide translates the common-sense engineering practices around API keys into the specific context of crypto exchanges, and expands on the basics with the details that actually get skipped — rotation, multi-key segmentation, and what real-world breaches look like when these controls are missing. It contains no real keys and no platform-specific click-through instructions; for the latter, defer to your exchange’s own documentation. ...