What guardrails are
Guardrails are the checks Cove runs before or during a trade. They sit between your tap and the chain, and they exist because on-chain trading has failure modes that a normal exchange doesn't: pools that are too thin for your size, contracts that cap how much you can buy, gas that spikes past what a trade is worth, and price moves between quote and fill that turn a good entry into a bad one.
Every guardrail is configurable from Settings → Guardrails. None of them are hidden defaults you can't see. When a guardrail blocks or adjusts a trade, Cove tells you which one and why, so you can either change the trade or change the setting — deliberately.
Alongside guardrails, Settings also controls how the trade panel behaves, how positions are presented, how Cove behaves in groups, and the interface language. This page covers all of it.
The guardrails at a glance
Slippage
Slippage is the maximum difference between the price Cove quotes when you tap and the price at which the trade actually fills. On-chain, other transactions land between your quote and your fill, and each one moves the pool. Slippage tolerance tells Cove how much movement you'll accept before it refuses to fill.
Presets and custom values
Choose 10%, 20%, 40% or 80%, or enter a custom value from 1% to 100% with up to two decimal places. The presets are deliberately higher than what you'd see on a centralised exchange, because on-chain memecoin trading routinely involves pools where a single block of activity moves price by double digits.
Choosing a value
- Low slippage (1–10%) — for liquid tokens with deep pools. You get the price you saw or the trade doesn't fill. The downside: on a fast token, fills fail repeatedly and you miss the move.
- Medium slippage (20–40%) — for typical new launches and mid-cap memecoins. Trades fill through normal volatility; you accept a meaningfully worse price on violent moves.
- High slippage (80%+) — for the first minutes of a launch or extremely thin pools. You'll fill, but you're accepting that the fill could be dramatically worse than the quote.
Higher slippage doesn't mean you always pay more — it means you're allowed to. Most fills land close to quote regardless. The setting caps your worst case.
Degen mode
Degen mode reduces safeguards for the selected trade. It's a per-trade toggle on the panel, not a global setting, so you opt into it consciously each time. When it's on, Cove stops interrupting you with the checks that would otherwise block or slow a trade into a risky pool.
Use it when you know exactly what you're trading — a launch you've researched, a pool you've sized against — and you've already accepted the wider outcome range. Review your slippage and other guardrails before enabling it; degen mode makes the trade go through, it doesn't make the trade good.
Auto-adjust max buy
Some token contracts limit the maximum amount a single wallet can buy in one transaction, usually as an anti-whale or anti-bot measure at launch. Without this guardrail, a buy that exceeds the limit simply fails — and you've lost the seconds it took to find out.
With Auto-adjust max buy on, Cove detects the contract limit and reduces your order to the allowed maximum instead of failing. You get the biggest fill the contract allows and a note in the receipt telling you the amount was adjusted. It removes the need to calculate the maximum manually or retry with smaller amounts.
Liquidity protection
Liquidity protection checks the requested buy against the pool's reported liquidity and blocks buys that are too large for the pool. A buy that's a significant fraction of a pool's liquidity moves the price against you dramatically — you buy at one price and are immediately underwater because your own trade pushed the price up and the next sell will push it back down.
The trading panel shows liquidity on every token for this reason. Liquidity protection turns the number into an automatic check so you don't have to do the mental arithmetic on every trade. When it blocks a buy, the message tells you the pool is too thin for the size; reduce the size or, if you accept the impact, use degen mode.
High price-impact confirmation
Price impact is how much your trade itself moves the price. It's related to liquidity but specific to your size. High price-impact confirmation adds a confirmation step whenever a trade's impact exceeds Cove's threshold, showing you the impact before you commit.
Unlike liquidity protection, it doesn't block — it pauses. You see the number and decide. Leave it on if you trade a range of token sizes and want a safety stop on the big ones; it costs one tap on the trades where it matters and nothing on the rest.
Gas Surplus Budget
Cove sponsors gas up to $5 per trade. Sometimes the network costs more — an Ethereum trade during congestion, a complex multi-hop route, a sell on a chain where gas is hard to offset. When that happens, Cove needs to take the difference from your unified USDC balance, and the Gas Surplus Budget decides whether it asks first.
Options
Choose Off, $1, $3, $5, $10 or Custom.
- Off means Cove always asks before charging a surplus. You see a Pay $X prompt, approve or decline. Decline and the trade is rejected before it touches the chain — you pay nothing.
- A dollar budget means surpluses up to that amount are approved automatically. Surpluses above it still prompt.
Choosing a budget
If you trade mostly on Solana, Base and other low-gas chains, surpluses are rare and Off is fine — you'll almost never see the prompt. If you trade Ethereum or HyperEVM regularly, or you rely on limit orders that fill while you're away, a budget of $3–$5 means fills don't stall waiting for a tap you can't give. Resting orders that trigger against Off and need a surplus can't fill until you respond.
Trade panel settings
Settings → Trade panel controls what the trading panel shows and how it behaves.
Buy and sell presets
The quick-amount buttons on the Buy tab are your buy presets, in USDC. The percentage buttons on the Sell tab are your sell presets. Set them to the sizes you actually use. Four presets that match your real position sizes are faster than a custom-amount field every time.
Confirmations
Buy Confirm and Sell Confirm toggle a confirmation card before submission. The card shows the route, expected output, fee and gas. Turn them off for pure speed; leave them on to always see the plan before committing. Many traders keep Buy Confirm off and Sell Confirm on, since sells are usually less time-sensitive and more consequential.
Panel behaviour and links
Panel behaviour settings control how the panel updates and what it shows after a trade. Links settings define the extra links shown on the panel — explorer, scanner, chart provider — so the tools you check are one tap away.
Auto TP/SL
Auto TP/SL lives in Trade panel settings. Turn it on and define your take-profit levels (each with a percentage of the position to sell) and your stop-loss level. Every future market buy automatically ships with those orders attached. It's covered in depth on the Limit orders page.
Position panel settings
Settings → Position panel shapes the Positions view.
- Sell 100% in Positions shows a direct full-sell action next to each position in the panel.
- Sell 100% Links enables full-position sell links for position actions.
Both are off by default. Enable them if you exit positions whole and often and want it to be one tap.
Group buy/sell settings
Settings → Group buy/sell controls how Cove behaves when shared into groups.
- Group-buy limits cap the size of buys made through shared group links, protecting members from oversized accidental taps.
- Group-sell links control whether sell links are shared into groups alongside buy links.
These matter for group owners running Cove Buy and for anyone sharing Cove deep links into a community. See the Cove Buy page.
Language
Settings → Language changes the Cove interface language. Menus, panels, receipts and prompts switch to the selected language. Token data and on-chain identifiers are unchanged.
Recommended configurations
Conservative
Slippage 10–20%, degen mode off, auto-adjust max buy on, liquidity protection on, high price-impact confirmation on, Gas Surplus Budget Off, Buy Confirm on, Sell Confirm on, Auto TP/SL on with a stop at −20% to −30%. Every trade is checked, every surplus is approved by hand, every position has exits.
Active
Slippage 20–40%, degen mode off by default, auto-adjust max buy on, liquidity protection on, high price-impact confirmation on, Gas Surplus Budget $3, Buy Confirm off, Sell Confirm on, Auto TP/SL on. Fast buys, checked sells, fills that don't stall on gas.
Launch sniping
Slippage 40–80% for the first minutes then reduced, degen mode used per trade with intent, auto-adjust max buy on (launch contracts often cap buys), liquidity protection on, Gas Surplus Budget $5, both confirms off, Auto TP/SL on with a tight stop. Speed where it matters, protection where it counts.
None of these is right for everyone. The point of making every guardrail configurable is that the tool adapts to how you trade rather than forcing one risk posture on every user.
Why guardrails live in the product, not in advice
Every trading community tells newcomers to check liquidity, watch slippage and set stops. Almost nobody does it consistently by hand, because it's tedious and the moment of the trade is exactly when discipline is weakest. Cove's guardrails move those checks from advice into infrastructure. Set them once, calmly, and they run on every trade — including the ones you make at 3am on a phone because a group call just landed.
How guardrails interact
Guardrails aren't independent switches; they layer.
- Liquidity protection runs before slippage. If the buy is too large for the pool, it's blocked regardless of slippage. If it passes, slippage governs how much the fill can differ from quote.
- Auto-adjust max buy runs before both. The order is trimmed to the contract limit first, then checked against liquidity and slippage at the reduced size.
- High price-impact confirmation is a pause, not a block. A trade that passes liquidity protection but has large impact still shows you the number.
- Degen mode relaxes the checks for one trade. It doesn't change your saved settings; the next trade runs with full guardrails again.
- Gas Surplus Budget runs last, at submission, when Cove knows the actual gas estimate.
Understanding the order helps you read guardrail messages. "Blocked by liquidity protection" means size, not slippage. "Adjusted to max buy" means the contract, not Cove, set the cap.
Guardrails and resting orders
Every guardrail applies when a limit order, take-profit, stop-loss or DCA rung fires, using the settings in effect at fill time. Change slippage today and every resting order fills with the new value. For orders that may fire while you're away, the two settings that matter most are slippage — high enough to fill through the volatility that triggered the order — and a Gas Surplus Budget above Off, so a fill isn't held waiting for your approval.
Frequently asked
Do guardrails apply to sells? Slippage and the Gas Surplus Budget apply to every trade. Liquidity protection, auto-adjust max buy and price-impact confirmation are buy-side checks.
Do they apply in Cove Buy groups? Yes. A member's own guardrails run on every buy made through group buttons, plus their group-buy limits.
Do they apply to agents over MCP? Yes. An agent's trades run through the account's guardrails exactly like a human tap.
Can I set different guardrails per account? Guardrails are per profile. Use degen mode per trade when one trade needs looser rules.
What's a sensible first setup? Slippage 20%, everything on, Gas Surplus Budget $3, Buy Confirm on, Sell Confirm on, Auto TP/SL with a −25% stop. Loosen from there once you know how the tokens you trade behave.