How to Trade on Terminal (Formerly Padre): Your First Trade

Signing up for Terminal takes about two minutes. Two of those clicks decide whether you can still reach your money next year, and the app does not stop to explain either one.

Terminal is the trading app pump.fun acquired in October 2025, when it was called Padre. If the name change is what brought you here, read what the Padre to Terminal migration changed for your account first, because it settles which of the four live domains you should be using. Everything below assumes a brand new account at terminal.pump.fun.

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The whole flow, start to finish

Step 1: signing in

There is no registration form. Terminal's login is social, handled through Firebase, and it offers Telegram, Google and X.

Take Telegram. Not because the others are worse at logging you in, but because Terminal's notification system runs through Telegram, and signing in that way means buy alerts on your tracked wallets and wallet groups work without a second setup step later. Wallet groups get emoji names and push a message to you when they fire, which is genuinely useful once you are running more than one wallet.

One practical note if you are on a phone: there is no native iOS or Android app. Terminal is a progressive web app, so you add it to your home screen from the browser, and you sign in by scanning a QR code from a desktop session. We found no official native app on either store, so treat any "Padre app download" result offering an APK as something you cannot verify.

Step 2: the password, which is permanent

After the social login, Terminal asks you to set a password. This is not a login password. It is the encryption key for your wallet private keys, held locally, and the platform never receives it.

Padre's documentation was blunt about the consequence:

"I forgot my password, what now? Unfortunately, there is no way to recover a forgotten password. Since all private keys to your wallet are encrypted with this password, we strongly recommend exporting your private keys and securely storing them offline."

The live app agrees by omission. There is no forgot-password link, no reset email, no recovery questions, nothing. We looked for a reset flow in the production bundle and there is not one.

Worth clearing up while we are here: the "2FA" in Padre's old marketing is not an authenticator app. It refers to this password layer sitting on top of the Turnkey-managed keys. If you were expecting a six-digit code from Google Authenticator, that is not what this is.

Write the password down on paper. Put it somewhere a house fire and a dead SSD cannot both reach. This sounds like paranoid advice right up until the day it is not.

Step 3: export your private keys before you deposit

This is the step people skip, and it is the one the docs were most insistent about.

Terminal describes its wallets as non-custodial, and key handling runs through Turnkey, an outside key-management provider. The platform's own line was "Padre never stores or has access to your password. Your assets stay safe, even from us." That is the company describing itself, and we cannot audit it from outside. The part you can check yourself is narrower and more useful: the app generates a private key per wallet, it lets you export that key, and an exported key works in any compatible wallet whether or not Terminal is running. Which also means nobody can bail you out.

Two details that trip people up:

There is no seed phrase. Terminal issues a private key per wallet. If you create four wallets, you have four things to back up, and backing up one does nothing for the other three. People search for "Padre seed phrase" constantly and find nothing, because it does not exist.

Export is also the escape hatch. A private key you hold can be imported into Phantom or any other Solana wallet. That is what makes it a real backup rather than a ritual. When Turnkey had a roughly 15 minute outage in February 2025 that blocked signing entirely, the advice Padre gave its users was exactly this: always export your private keys.

Step 4: create a wallet and fund it

Wallets on Terminal are created per network. The live chain selector carries five: Solana, Ethereum, Base, BSC and Robinhood Chain. That last one has its own explorer entry and quote tokens inside the app and appears nowhere in Terminal's marketing copy. The launchpad on that chain, hood.fun, is built and run by a separate team, as are the venues Terminal routes orders to on every other chain.

Copy the deposit address from the Wallets page and send from an exchange or an external wallet. Then read the next paragraph twice.

Step 5: fix the settings before you touch a buy button

Here is the trap. Terminal's normal trading UI defaults to 20 percent slippage.

Slippage tolerance is the worst fill you are agreeing to accept. At 20 percent, you are telling the app that a price 20 percent away from your quote is fine. On an illiquid token with a thin curve, it will find that price. A trader on r/solana in February 2026 watched their balance drift from $40 to $30 with no explanation, then posted this:

"Somehow it says I bought $16 worth and sold it all for $2 how is that even possible."

They worked it out themselves the next day, with no help from support:

"To anyone struggling with the same issue I fixed it by changing my settings for buying and selling. The starting slippage is automatically 20% so change it if you are using low amounts of money!"

Another user hit the identical wall a month later. It is the single most expensive default in the product, and the official documentation never mentioned it. Set slippage to something you would genuinely accept before your first order. Our full write-up on why small trades lose money on Terminal covers what number to pick and why the answer changes with liquidity.

Two more toggles worth a glance:

MEV protection is on by default. The production code sets mevProtection: true, and it covers Ethereum, BSC and Solana. It is not available on Base, and not on Robinhood Chain. So if your first trade is a Base token, you are unprotected regardless of what the toggle looked like on the last chain you used.

Speed presets. The docs still call these P1, P2 and P3. The live app renamed them Normal, Fast and Ultra, with Inferno as a separate Solana-only mode. They set your priority fee and tip. Inferno fires the same transaction at bloXroute, NextBlock, Temporal and Jito simultaneously and keeps whichever lands first, discarding the rest, so you only pay the tip on the winner. It also runs a much more aggressive slippage preset internally, slippageBps: 5000, which is 50 percent. Do not make Inferno your first trade.

Step 6: reading the interface

Terminal is dark only. We found no light mode in the theme, and the type scale is small: body text runs 12 to 13 pixels and numbers are set in monospace so columns line up. It looks cramped for about a day before it starts feeling fast.

The pages you will actually use:

Trenches has saved filters on market cap, volume, top-10 holder percentage, insider holding, bonding progress and token age, plus a dev blacklist that holds up to 200 addresses, roughly 19 toggleable card metrics, and sound alerts with names like KACHING and YEAH BOY.

On the safety side, the trade page surfaces bundle analysis, dev and insider holding percentages, dev funding source, bot transaction detection, liquidity lock status and a freeze-authority warning. Several of those are Solana only. On Ethereum and Base the interface surfaces EVA Audit instead, and EVM tokens are checked against honeypot.is. Both of those are outside services whose results the app displays rather than analysis Terminal performs.

Step 7: placing the trade

Pick a token. Set your size. And be honest with yourself about that number, because the base rates on this asset class are grim. Only a small share of bonding-curve tokens ever graduate, most new launches are worthless within days, and losing traders outnumber winning ones. We are not attaching percentages to any of that here, because the figures in circulation come without sources we can check. None of it means every trade loses. It means the size of your first one should be a number you would shrug at.

The order type for a first trade is a market buy. Terminal supports plenty more, and they are good: stop loss, take profit, dip buys, trailing stops, DCA, dev-sell triggers, and launch buys that fire on token creation. Exit Strategies let you attach up to five independent take-profit and stop-loss conditions to a single entry, sized as a percentage of the live position so they rescale automatically. One catch worth knowing before you lean on them: an Exit Strategy cannot be edited after you confirm it. Get it right the first time or cancel and rebuild.

There are no TWAP orders, whatever third-party reviews claim. We searched the production bundle on 6 August 2026 and found no TWAP entry in the order enum.

What the buy actually costs

Take a $100 buy of a token still sitting on the pump.fun bonding curve:

Then you have to sell. If the token is still on the curve that is another 2.25 percent, so the round trip is roughly 4.5 percent of notional. The token has to move 4.5 percent in your favor before you break even.

If the token has graduated to PumpSwap, the second leg is cheaper. Canonical PumpSwap pools run a dynamic schedule starting at 1.25 percent under $85k market cap and stepping down to 0.30 percent above $20M. Non-canonical pools are a flat 0.30 percent. Terminal's own 1 percent does not change either way.

Cashback claws a little of that back. At the referred 35 percent rate, the $1.00 Terminal fee returns 35 cents in SOL, accruing per trade and claimable from the Rewards page. At the default 10 percent it is 10 cents. Neither is life-changing on one trade. Across a few hundred it is a materially different fee bill. The full fee breakdown has the complete tables including the PumpSwap tiers.

When the trade fails

It will, eventually. Terminal's error messages are specific enough to act on, which is more than most apps manage. Three you are most likely to meet on day one:

• Slippage Too Low. "Your slippage tolerance is too low to account for your trade's price impact. Consider retrying with higher slippage." This is the flip side of step 5. If you dropped slippage aggressively, thin tokens will bounce your order.
• Not Enough Funds. "The transaction could not be completed due to insufficient funds in your trading wallet." Usually the gas token, not the trade size. See step 4.
• Transaction Timed Out. "The transaction has failed to complete due to time out." The documented causes are a wallet balance too thin to cover trade plus costs, two transactions sent at once (a background limit order triggering while you click buy), or the price moving past your slippage before confirmation.

Every failure screen ends with "Please open a support ticket and provide error ID below." Support is a Discord ticket and nothing else. Use the invite the app ships, discord.gg/h6ZH2BaYJu, which is different from the one the old docs listed. We decoded the complete error catalog separately, including the honeypot, frozen-account and trade-limit messages.

Getting out

Selling works the same way in reverse, with one Solana-only shortcut worth knowing: Sell Initials dumps exactly enough of the position to recover your original stake, leaving the rest riding. It only works when you are in profit, which is the point.

Withdrawing is where people run into friction. The minimum is 0.01 SOL, and you need SOL to pay for the transaction even when the thing you are withdrawing is USDC. That process, plus the trapped-rent issue where the app creates two token accounts per buy instead of one, is covered in deposits and withdrawals.

The honest summary

Terminal is a competent trading app that hands you exportable keys and ships two defaults that will cost you money if nobody tells you about them. Now somebody has.

Do these four things and your first day goes fine: sign up through a referral link so you get 35 percent cashback instead of 10, write the password down, export the keys before the money arrives, and change slippage before you click buy. The rest of the product you can learn at your own pace. Once that first trade is behind you, the next thing worth learning is finding new pairs in the Trenches, which is where the filters, the safety flags and the alert sounds actually live.

What Terminal is not is fast enough to satisfy everyone. The recurring criticism, and the one comparison people actually make, is against Axiom on execution speed. Some users also report PnL numbers they do not trust. Support is a Discord ticket, and the documentation went offline in early 2026 and now redirects to a login wall. If that sounds disqualifying, it might be. If it sounds like every crypto trading product you have used, that is also fair.