You do not need an account, an exchange, or any money to start. Live prices are public, so the terminal is useful the second it opens. This page takes you from nothing to your first practice order.
1. Open the terminal
Go to terminal.pairlens.finance. You land on a live chart of Bitcoin against the US dollar, streaming from a real exchange. Nothing to install, no sign-up.
Prefer it as a real app on your desk? Grab the installer for macOS, Windows or Linux from the install page. Same terminal, plus a safer place to store keys later. On a phone, the same web address opens the mobile terminal.
2. Find a market
Press ⌘K (Ctrl+K on Windows and Linux) and type a name. “ETH”, “Apple”, “SOL”. Pick a result and the whole screen follows it: chart, order book, trade tape, everything.
A market is always a pair: what you are buying, priced in what you are
paying with. BTC-USDT means Bitcoin priced in Tether, a dollar stablecoin.
ETH-USD means Ethereum priced in dollars. The first half is what you get, the
second is what you spend.
Tip
Different exchanges list different pairs and quote slightly different prices for the same asset. That is normal, and the Multi-Price panel exists to show you the gap.
3. Read what is on screen
Three things are worth understanding before you trade anything:
The chart shows price over time. Each candle covers one slice of time and records four numbers: where price opened, where it closed, and the highest and lowest it reached in between. Green means it closed above where it opened. See the chart.
The order book shows the offers waiting to be filled right now, sellers above and buyers below. It tells you how much you could actually trade before moving the price. See the order book.
The tape shows trades that already happened, newest first. It is the only panel that cannot be faked, because everything on it already cleared. See time and sales.
Take the terminal tour for the rest of the screen.
4. Practise before you risk anything
Most exchanges run a free demo environment: a full copy of their trading system with fake money in it. Orders behave the same way, prices are real, and nothing you do can cost you anything.
Open Accounts in the left nav, hit Connect Account, pick your venue, and choose Paper when the wizard asks for a trading mode. Now place an order and watch what happens. See paper trading for all three ways to practise.
5. Connect a real account when you are ready
Same flow, with Live selected instead. You paste an API key that the exchange issues you from its own settings page. That key is stored on your device and used only to sign requests to that one venue.
Your keys stay put
Pairlens has no server that could hold your secrets. On the desktop app, credentials live in the macOS Keychain, Windows Credential Manager, or Linux Secret Service. In the web terminal they stay in your browser, encrypted at rest, behind a vault you unlock with a password, a passkey, or Touch ID.
Before your first live order, set your risk guardrails. They are a daily loss cap and a maximum position size, checked by the terminal before any order leaves your machine. Five minutes now saves a bad afternoon later.
See connect an exchange for advice on which permissions to grant a key, and which to leave off.
Optional: run it from source
Everything the app does is in the public repository. Building it yourself takes one tool, or two for the native desktop shell. Skip this section entirely if you just want to trade.
$ git clone https://github.com/Pairlens/trading-terminal$ cd pairlens$ bun installTip
The maintainers use Bun and commit a bun.lock. bun install is the fastest
path and the one CI runs against.
bun run dev boots the terminal in your browser on http://localhost:3000;
bun run dev:desktop builds the native desktop app (needs Rust).
$ bun run dev
✓
terminal ready http://localhost:3000
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market data streaming direct from exchanges
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App Server: Pairlens Cloud (api.pairlens.finance)
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