Your First Hour on Terminal

Signing Up Is Social, Not Email and Password

Terminal signs you in through Telegram, Google or X. There is no email-and-password registration form and no KYC step. What the app does ask for, separately, is a password used to encrypt the private keys of the wallets it generates for you. That password is not a login credential and Terminal never stores it, which is the whole point of the design: keys are held on Turnkey infrastructure in an air-gapped setup, encrypted with something the platform does not have. Padre's own documentation put it as "Padre never stores or has access to your password. Your assets stay safe, even from us." Note that the "2FA" in the marketing refers to this encryption layer rather than an authenticator app. The full custody model is in Terminal wallets, custody and private keys.

There Is No Password Recovery. None.

This is the single most important sentence on the page. The archived documentation answered the question directly: "I forgot my password, what now? Unfortunately, there is no way to recover a forgotten password." The live app confirms it by omission. There is no reset flow, no recovery email, no support path. Because every wallet private key is encrypted with that password, forgetting it means the keys are unreadable and the funds behind them are unreachable. The docs' own recommendation was to export your private keys and store them offline, and that advice is correct. Nobody complains about this publicly because the failure is silent right up to the moment it is total.

Export Your Keys Before You Deposit, Not After

Terminal does not use a seed phrase. Each wallet has its own private key, which is why people search for a mnemonic that does not exist and then assume something is broken. Export each key from the wallets screen and store it offline before the first deposit lands. There are two concrete reasons beyond forgotten passwords. In February 2025, a roughly fifteen-minute Turnkey outage blocked transaction signing across the whole app, and Padre's own advice at the time was to always keep your keys exported. And the standard fix for a stuck withdrawal, the one that actually works, is to import the private key into Phantom and send from there. Both of those require a key you already have. The step-by-step is in funding and withdrawing on Terminal.

Turn the Slippage Down Before Your First Trade

Terminal ships with slippage set to 20% in the normal interface, and 50% in Inferno mode presets. On a large order in a deep pool that tolerance is mostly harmless. On a $20 buy into a thin bonding-curve token it means you have pre-authorized a fill up to a fifth worse than the quote, in both directions, on every trade. A trader on r/solana in February 2026 watched a $40 balance drift to $30, posted that he had somehow bought $16 of a token and sold it all for $2, then diagnosed it himself the next day: "The starting slippage is automatically 20% so change it if you are using low amounts of money." A second user hit the same wall a month later. The official documentation never mentioned it. Set it to something you would actually accept before you place an order, and read why small trades lose money on Terminal for the arithmetic.

Funding a Wallet and Getting Money Back Out

Terminal generates its own wallets rather than connecting to an existing one, so funding means sending assets to an address it gives you. It also accepts imported wallets, which is why it asks for a private key on import and why that request alarms people who have not read the custody model. The chain selector covers Solana, Ethereum, Base, BNB Chain and Robinhood Chain, one more than the marketing copy claims. Withdrawals need a minimum of 0.01 SOL and enough SOL left over to pay for the transaction, which is the origin of the most common stuck-withdrawal complaint: a wallet holding only USDC cannot pay its own gas. The app tells you to swap USDC to SOL first. There is also a Padre-era quirk worth knowing, where some Solana buys create a second token account whose rent never comes back, costing a few cents per trade.

Mobile Is a Web App, Not an App Store Download

There is no native iOS or Android build of Terminal. What ships is a progressive web app, installable from the browser, with a manifest that identifies itself as "Terminal" and runs standalone. Signing in on a phone works by scanning a QR code from a desktop session. This trips people up because pump.fun does publish a native app, but that is the launchpad, not the terminal. Anything in an app store claiming to be the Padre or Terminal trading app is not from pump.fun.

What to Read Next

Once your first trade has settled, the useful next stop is the trading hub, which covers the real order types and the exit-strategy system that lets you attach up to five independent take-profit and stop-loss conditions to a single buy. If you want to understand the bill before you scale up, the fees hub explains how Terminal's flat 1% stacks with pump.fun's separate bonding-curve fee. And if you are still deciding whether to use Terminal at all, Terminal vs Axiom is honest about where Terminal loses.