3Commas vs Botsfolio: Is 3Commas Safe and What Can You Check?

Jay Sharma · Founder, Botsfolio

Published November 14, 2026

On September 11, 2026, 3Commas switched off the platform that made its name. Its help center records the moment in one flat sentence: "3Commas v1 was deactivated on September 11, 2026." The replacement, V2, was in the company's words "built in partnership with WunderTrading". Bots that customers had tuned for years did not come along. Neither did their exchange keys.

That is why "is 3Commas safe" and "3Commas alternatives" are being typed into search boxes this autumn. It is also why so many of the answers are stale. Most of the comparison pages we read while preparing this one still describe the old platform.

So this page works differently. It takes the questions people ask about 3Commas and answers each one from 3Commas' own pages, a court record and news reports from the time. Then it puts Botsfolio through the same questions. We make Botsfolio, so weigh that. Every source is linked so you can check us.

What 3Commas is, in its own words

3Commas is software for building trading bots. You connect an exchange account with an API key, choose a bot type, pick a pair and set the numbers: order sizes, price steps, profit targets. The bot then follows those settings around the clock. The company is exact about where its job ends. A line on its homepage reads: "3Commas provides software only."

What it does not publish is a result. We read the homepage and the pricing page on November 13, 2026 and found no return figure, no trade history, no worst drop and no comparison with simply holding. The homepage FAQ does ask the question every buyer has: "Does automated trading work better than buying and holding?" Its answer: "Automated trading has already been proven to work over the course of millions of trading bots." No number follows.

That is not a trick. It is the honest shape of a tool business. A hammer maker doesn't publish how your shelves turned out. But it does mean the two things you have to take on trust are the platform's safety and its staying power. Both have a public history.

Is 3Commas safe?

Start with the design, which is sound. 3Commas never holds your money. Its homepage says: "3Commas does not have access to your exchange account and cannot withdraw your funds." Its security page says of the software: "It has zero access to withdraw or transfer fiat or cryptocurrencies." Your cryptos stay on your exchange.

The history is harder reading. In late December 2022 a file of 3Commas customers' API keys appeared online. Binance's chief executive at the time said he was "reasonably sure" keys had leaked from the platform, The Block reported. On December 28, 2022 the company confirmed it. Cointelegraph carried its statement: "We saw the hacker's message and can confirm that the data in the files is true." 3Commas said it had asked Binance, KuCoin and other exchanges to revoke the keys connected to it.

A key that can trade but cannot withdraw still matters when it gets out. Whoever holds it can place trades in your account. A bad trade can move money out of your pocket as surely as a withdrawal.

Customers sued. In Freeman v. 3Commas Technologies OÜ, a proposed class action over the alleged breach, a district court first dismissed the case because it found it had no jurisdiction over the Estonian company. On March 2, 2026 the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit reversed that dismissal, according to a summary by the law firm DLA Piper. That ruling was about where the case can be heard. It decided nothing about who is right.

What should a buyer take from this? A leak four years ago does not describe how 3Commas stores keys today. It does tell you which questions to put to any bot, ours included. What can the connection do? What happens if it leaks? Our guide to connecting an exchange safely shows the settings that limit the damage. Are AI trading bots legit covers the wider checks.

What happened to 3Commas V1?

The help center article on V2 answers this better than any review, because 3Commas wrote it for its own customers. Four lines carry the story:

• "3Commas v1 was deactivated on September 11, 2026."
• "Your strategies do not transfer to v2 automatically."
• "Your keys won't carry over to V2". You connect your exchange again on the new platform.
• Orders that old bots had already placed on an exchange "remain live but are no longer managed by 3Commas".

The same article adds a piece of housekeeping: "we also recommend revoking the 3Commas API key from your exchange account after the closure."

If you were a V1 customer, those last two lines are worth acting on today. Look at your exchange for orders the old bots left behind and remove the old key.

For everyone else the lesson is about dependence. A bot you build on someone's platform lives exactly as long as the platform keeps running it. No software company can promise it will be here in five years. We don't either. What you can check in advance is what you would be left holding if it stopped.

Is 3Commas profitable?

There is no published answer, because 3Commas publishes no results and the outcome depends on settings you choose. What can be checked is how its best-known bot behaves. The help center is frank about it.

A DCA bot on 3Commas buys. If the price falls it buys more at set steps. The company calls these safety orders. Each one pulls the average entry price down, so a smaller bounce is enough to close the deal in profit. In a market that dips and recovers, it works again and again.

The catch is the fall that doesn't recover. From 3Commas' guide to the DCA bot: "If the price falls further than this, the bot has spent all its safety orders and simply holds the position; it can no longer improve your average." A ladder that covers too little of a fall, the same page says, "will exhaust its safety orders in a genuine downturn and leave you holding an un-averaged bag." And the stop loss that would cap the damage is, per the company's setup guide, "Off by default".

None of this is hidden. None of it is special to 3Commas. It is how this kind of bot works everywhere. Cryptohopper's help center says of the same method: "While DCA can mitigate losses, it can also amplify them in a prolonged downtrend if the asset's price doesn't recover."

How often does it end well? We looked for an independent study of real bot accounts and found none. The nearest thing to data comes from a competitor of both companies. Bitsgap published results for bots closed on its own platform in the first half of 2026. For spot DCA bots, 40.95% closed in profit. The average return was -0.10% and the median was 0.01%.

Read that with care. Those are Bitsgap's customers, not 3Commas' customers. The figures are Bitsgap's own and nobody outside the company can check them. It is still the only platform-wide number we found for this kind of bot. We go through it line by line in Bitsgap vs Botsfolio.

What about 3Commas' AI?

AI made building a bot easy. It did not make the idea any better.

3Commas now has a serious answer for people who can't build a strategy. In June 2026 it opened QuantPilot to the public. The launch post states the idea plainly: "if a trader can describe an idea in plain language, they should be able to test it and run it". You type the idea. AI agents write the strategy, backtest it and tune it. The finished strategy can "deploy to live trading in a single click".

That takes away the settings screen, the part of a bot builder that stops most newcomers. Two questions are left standing. Whose idea is it? Still yours. What is the evidence that it works? A backtest of the strategy the AI has just built.

Read how the tuning is described: "AI agents optimize strategies for maximum profit and validate robustness against different market conditions." Checking a strategy against different conditions is the right instinct. Tuning it for maximum profit on prices that have already happened is the oldest trap in this field. 3Commas also runs a competition on that footing, where strategies are "ranked by backtest results". A contest like that rewards whoever fits the past best. The research on why is in Coinrule vs Botsfolio.

Botsfolio does not ask you for an idea at all. You pick the cryptos and the amount. Botsfolio AI does the research and testing and trades them on your own exchange account. The evidence is not a backtest of something built a minute ago. It is a live record of what happened next, shown next to holding the same cryptos.

What 3Commas costs

On November 13, 2026 the pricing page listed three plans at $20, $50 and $140 a month on monthly billing, with lower prices if you pay for a year. It is a flat subscription. The price is the same in a month your bots make money and a month they lose it. It is the same whether you trade $500 or $50,000.

On a small account that fixed cost is heavy. We worked through the arithmetic for every well-known bot in what crypto trading bots cost.

What you have to do yourself

This is the real dividing line between products in this market. It matters more than any feature list.

With 3Commas the research is your job. Which bot, which pair, how many safety orders, how far apart, whether to use a stop. If you enjoy that work and you are good at it, 3Commas is a capable workshop. If you came looking for something to do that work, it was never built for you.

How Botsfolio is built

Botsfolio starts from the other end. You pick the cryptos and the amount. You can stop at any time. Botsfolio AI does the research. It generates trade ideas, tests them on years of market data, finds what is working and uses that to trade the cryptos you picked. Most ideas fail its tests and are never used.

Three things follow. You can check each without opening an account.

Where the money sits. Botsfolio trades on your own exchange account, through Coinbase sign-in or an API key that cannot withdraw. It refuses keys that can.

What it has done. Every filled trade, paper and real money, goes into a public log that is sealed every hour, signed by Botsfolio and anchored in Bitcoin. A seal shows who published a row, when it existed and that it has not changed since. Real-money rows carry the time, the crypto, the side, the fill price, the exchange and the fee. They never carry a name, an account or a size.

What it costs. There is no subscription. Paper trading is free. With real money you pay a small fee only when a trade fills. The numbers are on the pricing page.

The results are kept as three separate records, each next to holding the same cryptos. They are not the same kind of evidence. Each page says which kind it is. Here they are as of the last daily close:

You can also watch it happen. Botsfolio AI's own paper portfolios trade in public on the watch page. It also runs live trading battles against Claude, GPT and copied top traders, with every trade logged.

Where 3Commas is the better choice

A comparison written by one side should say where the other side wins. Here is where 3Commas does.

• You want to design the strategy. 3Commas lets you set every parameter of a bot. Botsfolio does not let you build grid or DCA bots at all.
• You want futures. 3Commas' higher plans cover futures trading. Botsfolio trades spot only.
• You already have a setup that works. If your own bot has a record you trust, a published record from someone else adds little.
• You have your own idea and want it running fast. QuantPilot takes an idea in plain language to a deployed strategy. Botsfolio starts from the cryptos you pick, not from a strategy you bring.

If none of those is you, the question to ask of 3Commas is the one this page keeps returning to: with no published results, how will you know whether your setup is working, compared with just holding? Our buy and hold comparison guide shows how to measure it for any bot.

Side by side

FAQ

Sources

Botsfolio is software. It is not investment advice and it is not tailored to you. Botsfolio has no affiliation with 3Commas. 3Commas is a trademark of its owner, used here only to name the product. Paper trading results are simulated. Trading crypto can lose money. Past performance does not predict future results.