Pionex vs Botsfolio: What a Grid Bot Does When Prices Fall

Jay Sharma · Founder, Botsfolio

Published November 14, 2026

New users arrive at Pionex with the same wish. You can read it in the post titles on the Pionex subreddit. One says: "Starting pionex for first time, safest bot to make". Another: "which bot for set and forget...".

It is a fair thing to want. Pionex made grid bots free and put them one tap away. A grid bot in a sideways market is a pleasant thing to own. It buys a little lower, sells a little higher and lets small profits tick up while you sleep.

Then the market picks a direction. What happens next is written down in Pionex's own help center and in the help center of every exchange that offers a grid bot. The reviews we read while preparing this page mostly leave it out. So this page quotes it, adds the little data that exists and then asks the second question a Pionex user should ask: who is holding my money? We make Botsfolio, so weigh that. Every source is linked.

What Pionex is

Pionex is a crypto exchange. Its selling point is that the bots live inside the exchange, so there is no API key to create and no second product to pay for. Its fee page says: "Pionex does not charge bot usage fees." You pay the trading fee, 0.05% on spot, each time a bot buys or sells. Three leveraged bots are the exception and take 20% of profits.

One naming point, because old reviews get it wrong. The US service that used to be called Pionex.US now has its own name. Its help center says: "Webot is the official brand upgrade of Pionex.US". Both help centers describe the grid bot in the same terms, as the quotes below show.

Because Pionex is the exchange, your money is on Pionex. Hold that thought. We come back to it.

How a grid makes money and when it stops

A grid bot takes a price range that you choose and slices it into levels. Every time the price drops a level, it buys a little. Every time the price rises a level, it sells a little. Each completed pair is a small profit. In a market that wobbles inside the range, those pairs add up.

Now the two ways out of the range.

The price falls through the bottom. The bot has bought at every level on the way down. It now holds the crypto and has nothing left to do. Pionex's grid bot FAQ describes the state: "If the price drops below the lower limit price: you are holding a full position". The same page is direct about what the bot will not do for you: "There is no Trailing Down feature". The grid does not follow the price lower.

The US service says the same in its own guide: "Below Lower Limit: The investment has been fully deployed into the base currency (100% position)." And it adds a warning: "Falling below the lower limit means you are holding a full position."

Bybit, which sells the same kind of bot, spells out the worst case with unusual candor: "Sustained downtrends carry the highest risk." The bot keeps holding the token while the grid sits idle and its value keeps falling, in Bybit's words "with no way to respond."

The price rises through the top. This one hurts less but still costs. The bot has sold at every level on the way up and now sits in cash while the rally continues without it. Webot's guide says the bot "incrementally sells positions as the price rises", so in a sharp rise it can end up with less than simply holding would have made.

So a grid is a bet that the price stays in a box. It is a good bet in some markets. It is not a machine that prints money in all of them. The people who build these bots don't claim it is.

Why the bot is green while the balance is down

This is the most common confusion in grid trading, common enough that exchanges answer it in their FAQs.

A grid bot shows a number called grid profit. It counts the completed buy and sell pairs. It does not count the crypto the bot bought on the way down and is still holding at a loss.

Bybit's help center says it in one sentence: "it's possible to have a positive Grid Profit while simultaneously experiencing a negative Total P&L, indicating that the realized profits are not enough to cover the unrealized losses".

The practical rule is short. Ignore grid profit. Read the total. Read it next to what you would have if you had simply held. Our buy and hold comparison guide shows how.

What the data says

How often does a grid end up ahead? Pionex publishes no results for its bots that we could find. We found no exchange that reports how its grid bots did overall. What exchanges show is leaderboards of bots that are doing well today, which is a different thing.

Two sources come closest to an answer.

The first is a competitor's own platform data. Bitsgap reported that of the grid bots closed on its platform in the first half of 2026, 35.14% closed in profit. The average return was 2.34% and the median was 0.51%. Those are Bitsgap's customers, the data is Bitsgap's own and nobody outside can check it. Bitsgap's explanation, in another post, is that a grid "loses its edge the moment a market commits to a direction instead". We go through those figures in Bitsgap vs Botsfolio.

The second is academic. A 2025 preprint by Chen, Chen and Jang studied grid trading on bitcoin and ether with minute-by-minute prices from January 2021 to July 2024. Of the traditional grid, the authors write that "under simple assumptions, its expected return is essentially zero." The paper has not been peer reviewed. The authors go on to propose a modified grid that they say did better in their tests. But the starting point is worth sitting with. A plain grid, with no view on where the market is going, is expected to earn about nothing.

What about Pionex's AI?

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

On Pionex the AI is a button. When you create a grid you can skip the settings and use AI Strategy. Webot's guide explains where the numbers come from: "Both Moderate and Aggressive modes utilize AI-generated parameters derived from backtesting data over a specific number of days". You enter an amount. The system fills in the settings from backtests over the last 7, 30 or 180 days.

That is a real help with the question of which settings to use. It does not touch the question that matters more, which is whether this is a market for a grid at all. A range drawn from recent months fits recent months. Once the price leaves it, a grid set up by AI behaves exactly like one set up by hand. It holds the crypto and waits.

For people who want their own strategy, Pionex's signal bot guide suggests writing one with a chatbot: "Use any AI platform to create a TradingView Pine Script." Then comes a step worth reading twice: "Modify the indicator settings to adjust the backtesting results before connecting the strategy to a Pionex Signal Bot." Adjusting settings until the backtest looks right is how a strategy gets fitted to the past. The research on that is in Coinrule vs Botsfolio.

With Botsfolio there are no settings to fill in and no strategy to write. You pick the cryptos and the amount. Botsfolio AI does the research and testing and trades them on your own exchange account. What it did in the weeks when prices fell is in the public record.

Is Pionex safe?

Here the question changes. With 3Commas or Bitsgap, the software connects to an exchange account that is yours. With Pionex, the exchange is Pionex. If you use its bots, your money is on its books.

Two public documents help you judge that.

Reserves. Pionex's help center says that two audit firms "completed signing the audit reports on January 19th, 2023" on its proof of reserves. An audit of reserves checks that customer balances were backed on a date. It says nothing about bot results.

Regulators. On May 28, 2025, Pionex Inc., the US company, signed a consent order with the money transmission regulators of Nebraska, North Carolina, Ohio and South Dakota. The order followed an examination covering August 2022 to September 2024. According to the order, the examination report cited a violation of the funds transfer rule, that "Pionex failed to collect sender and beneficiary information for transactions exceeding $3,000.00". It listed state-level deficiencies too, the first of which was a "Failure to implement an effective and comprehensive information security program". The order also cites unlicensed activity in two states before licenses were approved. The penalty was $20,000.00, split between North Carolina and Ohio.

The order contains a sentence that fairness requires quoting: "Pionex does not admit any wrongdoing". A consent order is a settlement. It is not a finding of fraud. It is the kind of document that exists because a regulated company is being watched, which is more than can be said of an unregulated one.

We found no report of Pionex being hacked.

Our own view is simple and you may weigh it differently. Fewer parties holding your money is better than more. If a bot can do its job on an exchange account in your own name, it should.

What Pionex costs

Almost nothing. That is a real strength. No subscription and no bot fee. You pay 0.05% per spot trade. A grid trades often by design, so the fees add up, but on a small account they stay far below a monthly subscription. The arithmetic for each kind of bot is in what crypto trading bots cost.

What you have to do yourself

A grid's range is the whole strategy. Too narrow and the price leaves it. Too wide and the bot barely trades. And once the price does leave, the choices are yours again: wait, widen or close and take the loss. Pionex's FAQ notes that changing the range on a bot that is underwater "would realize (lock in) part of your floating loss."

How Botsfolio is built

Botsfolio is not an exchange and holds no money. You connect an exchange account that is in your own name, through Coinbase sign-in or an API key that cannot withdraw. Botsfolio refuses keys that can.

Then 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. There is no range for you to set and no moment when the bot hands the problem back.

What Botsfolio adds on top is the thing a grid leaderboard can't give you: a record that includes the bad weeks. Every filled trade, paper and real money, goes into a public log that is sealed every hour, signed by Botsfolio and anchored in Bitcoin. Results are shown next to holding the same cryptos over the same days.

The last five weeks were a fair test, because the market fell. From the October 9 close to the November 13 close, holding bitcoin and ether lost 19.93%. Over those same days Botsfolio AI's paper portfolio in our public battle lost 3.46%, with a worst drop of 4.0%. That is paper money on live prices and one stretch of one market. It is also checkable, trade by trade.

Here are all three records as of the last daily close:

Where Pionex is the better choice

• You want the lowest running cost. Pionex's bots are free beyond a 0.05% trading fee. Botsfolio charges a fee when a trade fills, on top of your exchange's own fee.
• You want nothing to connect. The bots are inside the exchange. There are no keys to make.
• You want to run a grid. If you think a crypto will stay in a range and you are willing to manage that range, a grid is the right tool and Pionex's is cheap. Botsfolio does not offer grid bots.
• You want futures or leverage. Pionex offers leveraged bots. Botsfolio trades spot only.
• You want the grid's settings filled in for you. AI Strategy does that from recent backtests.

If you do run a grid, Webot's own guide points to the first piece of housekeeping, a stop-loss price in the advanced settings for a sustained drop. Two more follow from everything above. Judge the bot on total profit, not grid profit. Compare it with holding once a month.

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 Pionex. Pionex 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.