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Halyrd’s kill switch is the self-custody answer to a single question: what if you need to stop all live transactions immediately, with no exceptions? When you activate it, the Trust Wallet Agent Kit (TWAK) session is revoked. From that moment, your agent is physically incapable of signing any transaction — not because of a software rule that could have a bug, but because the signing capability itself no longer exists until you restore it.

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What the kill switch actually does

Halyrd uses a two-layer risk system. The Risk Engine is the policy layer — it decides whether a trade fits the strategy and risk rules. TWAK is the physics layer — it decides whether a transaction is permitted to exist at all, at the signing level, outside our application code. The kill switch operates exclusively at the physics layer. It revokes the TWAK session that grants the agent signing rights. Once revoked:
  • The agent cannot submit any live transaction to BSC, regardless of what the policy layer says
  • No token swap, no position entry, no exit — nothing can be signed
  • This holds even if the agent’s own code attempts to execute a trade
This is the self-custody guarantee in action: because signing happens locally on your machine and is session-based, revoking the session is a hardware-level stop. There is no prompt, no rule, and no configuration the agent could override to get around it.
Activating the kill switch stops all live trading immediately and permanently until you restore the TWAK session. Use it when you need to halt real transactions urgently — for example, if market conditions change dramatically, if you observe unexpected behaviour in the journal, or if you simply want to step away from live trading with certainty that nothing can execute.

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How to activate the kill switch

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Open Settings
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Navigate to Settings (/settings). The kill switch is in its own section near the bottom of the page, marked with a red button.
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Click the Kill Switch button
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Click the red Kill Switch button. A confirmation dialog opens.
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Type the confirmation phrase
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To prevent accidental activation, the dialog requires you to type a short confirmation phrase — for example, “revoke signing” — before the action can be confirmed. This friction is intentional: the kill switch has immediate, real consequences.
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Confirm
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Click Confirm after typing the phrase. The TWAK session is revoked instantly.
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Observe the updated state
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Two things update immediately after activation:
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  • The Risk desk (/risk) physics column updates to show the kill switch state: “Revoked”
  • The Journal logs a KILL entry with a timestamp, confirming the session was revoked and noting that live signing is no longer available
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    The status badge in the header also reflects that live trading is disabled.

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    After activation

    The kill switch affects the physics layer only. The agent’s paper-trading loop and journal continue running normally after activation. The agent keeps pulling live market data, computing signals, and logging paper trades — it just cannot sign any real transactions. No paper-trade journal entries are lost, and evaluation metrics keep accumulating.
    Here is exactly what continues and what stops after the kill switch is activated:
    ActivityAfter kill switch
    Paper-trading loop✅ Continues
    Journal entries (paper)✅ Continues
    Evaluation metric tracking✅ Continues
    Risk Engine policy checks✅ Continues
    Live BSC transaction signing🚫 Blocked at the signing layer
    Live position entries🚫 Blocked
    Live position exits🚫 Blocked
    This means the kill switch is safe to use as a pause rather than a permanent stop. The agent’s track record keeps building in paper mode while signing is revoked.

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    Kill switch vs. demotion — what’s the difference?

    Both demotion and the kill switch take the agent off live trading, but they work differently and serve different purposes.
    DemotionKill switch
    Triggered byAutomatic drawdown breachYou, manually
    TWAK sessionPreserved — paper trades can graduate back to liveRevoked — no live signing possible at all
    RecoveryAutomatic (daily breach) or manual re-approval (max breach)Requires restoring the TWAK session
    Paper tradingContinuesContinues
    Risk layer affectedPolicy layer (Risk Engine) triggers the state changePhysics layer (TWAK signing)
    The key distinction: a demoted agent still has an intact TWAK session. When the lockout period ends or you re-approve it, live trading can resume without any extra steps. A kill-switched agent has no signing session at all — re-enabling requires restoring the TWAK session separately.

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    Re-enabling after activation

    Restoring a revoked TWAK session is outside the scope of this guide. Refer to the Trust Wallet Agent Kit documentation for instructions on re-establishing a signing session. Once the session is restored, the agent can be promoted back to live trading through the normal promotion flow in Settings.