Start
Your first trade
From an empty vault to a landed buy and its receipt, in the full-screen terminal. About five minutes, most of it waiting for SOL to arrive.
Start zeroterm with npx zeroterm (or zeroterm if you installed it with npm install -g, or pnpm start from source). Every key below is also listed on screen: press ? at any time.
1. Point it at your RPC
zeroterm starts on Solana's public RPC. That is fine for looking around, but it is slow and rate-limited, and it is the one thing that most decides how fast your trades land.
Press r, paste your RPC URL and press ⏎. Any Solana mainnet RPC works, and many providers have a free plan. Your own RPC also turns on the LaunchLab and Meteora new-coin feed, which the public RPC is too rate-limited for.
2. Create the vault
Press u and type a passphrase of at least 10 characters, twice. It encrypts your wallet keys on this machine.
Nobody can recover it. There is no server and no account, so there is no "forgot passphrase". Write it down somewhere safe.
3. Add a wallet
- i imports a wallet you already have. Paste its secret key: base58, as Phantom exports it, or the JSON byte array that
solana-keygenwrites. - n creates a new wallet in the vault.
Press y to copy the wallet's address, and send it SOL. With more than one wallet, x switches between them.
How much: the trade itself, a small rent deposit for each coin's token account (about 0.0015 SOL, which comes back when the account is closed), and the fees. For a 0.05 SOL test buy, 0.06 SOL covers everything.
4. Pick a coin
- The pit, on the left, lists coins as they launch. ↑ ↓ (or j k) move, ⏎ opens one.
- h switches the pit to hot coins: the hour's hottest SOL pools on any venue.
- / opens any coin by its mint address.
The board shows the live price and market cap, where the coin trades, how far its bonding curve has filled, and a tape of trades since you opened it.
5. Size the order
| Key | What it sets |
|---|---|
| 1 – 5 | Buy size: 0.05, 0.1, 0.25, 0.5 or 1 SOL. Change the five in Settings. |
| a | Any buy size you type. |
| t | Speed: eco, fast or turbo. It starts on fast. See Speed and routes. |
| [ ] | Slippage down or up by 5 points, between 1% and 50%. It starts at 15%. |
Slippage is how far the price may move between your quote and the block before the trade fails instead of filling. On a coin that is moving fast, too little slippage means failed trades; too much means a worse fill.
The order card shows the quote: the tokens you would get, the price impact, the venue's fee, and zeroterm's fee, which is always 0.
6. Dry run it
Press d. zeroterm builds this exact order and runs it through mainnet's simulateTransaction, then shows what your wallet would receive. Nothing is signed or sent, and the vault does not need to be unlocked. Do this before your first real trade on any venue.
7. Buy
Press b. The order card changes to b again to confirm: the trade is now built, signed and waiting, and zeroterm has opened a connection to every route it will use. Press b again within three seconds and it goes out at once.
When it lands you see the slot and the time, for example Landed in slot 381,204,117 · 412 ms · zeroterm fee 0, and the receipt joins the strip at the bottom.
8. Read the receipt
The receipt shows what the chain recorded: the SOL that went in, the tokens that came out, each route and how long it took, the slot it landed in and how many slots after sending, and what your comparison terminal would have charged. Receipts and positions explains every field.
9. Sell
q w e pick 25, 50 or 100% of what this wallet holds of the coin. Then s, and s again to confirm.
When you are done
- W then r closes the token accounts your sells left empty and returns their rent.
- W then s sends SOL back to your main wallet.
- L locks the vault and wipes the keys from memory. ctrl+c quits, which does the same.