Most problems in Pairlens have one of five causes: the wrong country is set, the venue needs the desktop app, an account is not connected, an App Server is not configured, or a socket went quiet. This page is ordered by symptom.
A venue will not connect
Check your country first. Connectors route to regional endpoints, and the
wrong country sends requests to a host that will not answer for you. OKX sends
US and Australian traffic to us.okx.com and EU traffic to eea.okx.com, and
several venues refuse some regions entirely. Set it under
Settings → Country.
Some venues refuse some regions outright. When one does, you get a typed refusal and a dialog that names the region and offers venues that will serve you, rather than a timeout with no explanation. ByBit refuses the US. Bitvavo is EU only. Polymarket serves market data everywhere but refuses an order from a US country setting. Others vary. This is the venue’s rule, not ours, and no setting works around it.
Eight venues need the desktop app. Coinbase, Gate, KuCoin, MEXC, Bitfinex, Kalshi, KuCoin Futures and Kraken Futures refuse connections coming from a web page, as a policy of their own. No browser can reach them. In a browser they refuse with a clear message rather than presenting a dead chart, and on the futures and predictions discovery boards the venue’s own row says so instead of going blank. Install the desktop app or use one of the other fourteen.
Check the connection page. Settings → Connection shows which sockets are actually up.
Market data looks frozen
The connection dot in the pair header is the source of truth. If it reads Reconnecting, a socket went quiet and the terminal is already rebuilding it.
The usual trigger is a laptop waking from sleep, which the terminal detects and recovers from on its own. Give it a few seconds. If it stays reconnecting, the venue is likely having an incident.
If the dot is green but nothing moves, check Data Rate: Energy Saver caps the book and ticker at one update per second, which on a quiet pair genuinely looks static.
The chart shows only the newest candle
A chart gets its history from a single request to the exchange, made the moment you open a pair or change timeframe. The live price feed is separate, and it starts arriving first. So if that one call is slow, or the venue rate limits it because you have just switched a few times in a row, the terminal shows what it has: the bar currently forming, moving on its own with nothing behind it.
It fills itself in. The request is retried on a widening schedule for about twenty seconds, and the moment history arrives the chart redraws around it and snaps back to the latest bars. Nothing to click, and no need to change timeframe and change back.
If it is still a single bar a minute later, the venue is refusing the request rather than delaying it. Check the connection dot, then the country setting under Settings: a venue serving a region you are not in answers market data with a refusal, not with candles.
A stock chart asks me to unlock or connect
Alpaca has no public price feed. Its candles, quotes, and order book are all served from your own credentialed session, so unlike every crypto venue it shows nothing at all until a key reaches the connector. The panes say which of the two things is missing:
Connect Alpaca to see prices means no Alpaca key is stored on this device. The button opens the wizard on Alpaca directly.
Unlock to load Alpaca data means a key is probably there but the credential vault is sealed, which is what happens in a browser after every reload. One unlock and the chart, the book, and the watchlist quotes fill in without a refresh.
Account panels word it differently on purpose. Your Position asks you to connect Alpaca to see your account, because what a key unlocks there is your own shares, cost basis and P&L rather than a price feed. Margin Health does the same on the futures boards.
In a browser you can make that unlock a single touch by enrolling a passkey in Settings → Security. A passkey answers the lock screen and the vault in one gesture, where a password answers them one at a time. Pairlens offers this once, right after you connect Alpaca, because that is the moment a sealed vault starts costing you a chart rather than just an order ticket.
On desktop none of this applies: keys live in the OS keychain and load at startup.
A stock chart has gaps in it
Blank stretches on a US stock chart are almost always the market being shut. Equities trade 9:30am to 4:00pm Eastern on weekdays, so every intraday chart has a hole across each night and a wider one across each weekend. Crypto never closes, so the contrast is jarring the first time.
Shorter gaps inside a session are the feed rather than the clock. The free Alpaca plan carries the IEX tape, which is a single exchange and a small slice of total volume, so a quiet pre-market or after-hours bucket can pass with no trade printing on it at all and no candle to draw. Regular hours are dense; the edges of the day are patchy.
Neither is affected by whether the account is paper or live. Market data is the same feed either way.
A panel says it needs something
Panels declare requirements and say which one is unmet rather than rendering blank.
| Message | Fix |
|---|---|
| Needs an active pair | Pick one, or bind the workspace variable |
| Needs a wallet | Connect an account and select it |
| Needs an AI provider | Add a key or subscribe. See AI providers |
| Desktop only | The Web panel takes a native window. See desktop app |
| Not listed on this venue | The pair is real, this venue does not carry it. Switch venue |
Panels are missing from the catalogue
News, Top Coins, Heatmap, and Fear and Greed read from the App Server. In
standalone mode, or with
VITE_APP_SERVER_URL explicitly empty, they are hidden rather than broken.
Everything else works standalone, including all market data, because that comes from the venue directly.
I cannot sign in
Sessions use bearer tokens, not cookies, which is what makes sign-in work from the desktop app and from any origin. If sign-in fails with a bare network error, the App Server URL is usually wrong or unreachable. Check it under self-hosting.
OTP codes are emailed. Check spam before assuming the send failed.
The vault will not open
A sealed vault is not an empty one. If the vault is locked, credential reads throw rather than reporting your keys as absent, which is deliberate: silently reporting “no keys” would make a locked vault look like a wiped one.
Five wrong attempts arm a delay that doubles up to five minutes, shared between the vault and the lock screen and surviving a reload. Wait it out.
There is no recovery. If the password is gone, the only way past is Forgot your password? on the lock screen, which erases this device: every key, workspace, layout, and chat stored here. Synced settings return when you sign in again. Keys never do, because they were only ever here. See settings.
Touch ID stopped working on macOS. macOS invalidates the key whenever the fingerprints on the Mac change. Your password still works, and Touch ID can be re-enrolled. This is why Touch ID can never be your only way in.
An order will not submit
Work down this list.
- Risk guardrails. Check the Risk panel. If it reads Limit hit, Buys Locked, or Orders Locked, the cap you configured is doing its job. See risk guardrails
- Press and hold. The default submit gesture is a hold, and live orders hold longer than paper. Switch it to a single click in settings
- The lock. If you enabled lock-before-order, an order prompts for your password first
- API key permissions. A read-only key streams data happily and rejects every order. Check the key’s trade permission on the venue
- The venue rejected it. Minimum notional, tick size, and lot size are venue rules. The rejection message comes straight from the venue
Paper trading behaves oddly
“Paper” means three different things depending on where you are, and they simulate different amounts of reality: venue demo environments, bot paper mode, and assistant paper trades. Not every venue offers a demo environment. See paper trading.
A Python indicator or strategy will not run
Python runs locally in a Pyodide worker, so failures are local too.
- First run is slow. The runtime and any wheels download once, then cache
- A
pippackage will not install. Only pure-Python wheels from PyPI and the compiled wheels bundled for Pyodide are reachable. A package with a C extension that Pyodide has not built will not install - Nothing renders. Check that
computereturns an array per declared series, matching theseries=[...]in yourmeta
Bots stopped trading
- Hard lock seals the vault, and live bots cannot sign without it. Paper bots keep running. Locking the screen does not stop bots, only hard lock does
- Bots run on your machine. Close the terminal and they stop. This is an honest limit of a local-first design, and it is covered in bots
Something looks broken after an update
The web terminal ships new chunks on deploy. A tab left open across a deploy can hold a stale reference. Reload the page.
On desktop, check for updates from the app menu. Updates are signed and verified before they install. See the desktop app.
Still stuck
- Open an issue with what you did, what you expected, and what happened
- Every docs page has an Edit on GitHub link if the fix belongs here instead