How Pairlens works

You do not need to read this page to trade. It exists because “your machine talks straight to the exchange” is a claim, and claims should be checkable.

The shape of it

Most trading front-ends work like this: your browser talks to the company’s servers, and the company’s servers talk to the exchanges. Everything you see and everything you send passes through the middle. That middle can be slow, it can go down, it can see your positions, and in the worst designs it holds your keys.

Pairlens has no middle. The app running on your machine opens its own connection to each exchange, receives prices from them directly, and sends your orders back the same way.

   Your machine                          The exchange
   ────────────                          ────────────
   Pairlens  ──── live prices ──────────  Binance, Coinbase,
             ──── your orders ──────────  Alpaca, Kalshi, ...
   Your keys
   (never leave)

Three consequences follow, and they are the whole reason for the design:

Nobody is between you and the market. No added delay, no rewritten price, no outage in a service you did not choose.

Nobody can lose your keys but you. There is no Pairlens database of exchange credentials to breach, because none is ever sent.

It works without us. Turn off every optional service and the terminal still charts, still streams, still trades. Nothing about the core loop depends on a Pairlens account.

What each piece does

The terminal. The app itself, in your browser or on your desktop. It draws everything, runs the AI assistant’s logic, and hosts the plugins below.

Connectors. One small module per exchange, and the only code in the whole system allowed to talk to a venue. Connecting an account means handing your key to that one connector, which uses it to sign requests to that one exchange and nothing else. Adding a venue means adding a connector, which is why the venue list can grow without a new release. See connectors.

The strategy engine. The maths behind signals and indicators. Pure calculation over price history you already have, with no network access at all.

The Python runtime. If you write your own indicators or strategies, they run inside the terminal on your machine, never on a server. See Python scripts.

The App Server (optional). A small backend that does four things: email sign-in, syncing your layouts between devices, relaying AI requests if you use hosted Intelligence rather than your own key, and serving reference data no exchange publishes about itself, such as news, earnings and economic calendars, insider filings and aggregated liquidation data.

It never stores exchange credentials, and it never connects to an exchange on your behalf. Every price you trade against reaches you from the venue directly. You can run without it entirely.

Where your data lives

The pattern: local by default, synced only when you ask, and credentials never either way.

Plugins, briefly

Almost everything in Pairlens arrives as a plugin: venues, AI providers, panels, indicators, themes. Each one declares what it can do, and the terminal picks a provider for each job at runtime. That is why installing a plugin can add a whole exchange or a new panel without waiting for an app update.

Plugins you install yourself run in a sandbox with a network allowlist, and every package is cryptographically signed. See plugins for the trader’s view and the security model for the guarantees.

For builders

The technical version of this page lives in the repository’s CLAUDE.md and in the Plugin SDK, the MarketAdapter API, and the security model.