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Your Ballista account is two wallets that work together, plus a set of Polymarket API credentials. Understanding which is which explains where your money sits and what your exported key controls.

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The signing wallet

When you registered, Ballista generated an ordinary Ethereum keypair for you. The private key is encrypted before it is stored and decrypted only when something has to be signed on your behalf. This wallet does not hold your trading balance. Its job is to sign: order payloads for Polymarket’s order book, and the authentication that proves you own the account.

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The Polymarket proxy wallet

Registration also deploys a Polymarket proxy wallet controlled by that signing key. This is the wallet that matters day to day:
  • your USDC balance lives there,
  • your positions are held there,
  • it is the address Polymarket knows you by — the Telegram bot’s wallet screen and the terminal’s deposit dialog link it to its Polymarket profile page and to PolygonScan.
Because the proxy wallet holds the funds and the signing key merely authorises it, you never pay gas to place an order. Ballista also grants the token approvals Polymarket’s contracts need during setup, which is why order placement just works from the first deposit.

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One balance, every surface

There is a single balance, read live from Polymarket, and every surface reads the same one. The bot’s main menu, the terminal’s deposit dialog and the extension’s wallet tab are three views of one number. The same is true of everything built on it. Positions opened in Telegram appear in the terminal’s portfolio. A preset saved in the extension shows up in the terminal. A copy trade created in the bot runs whether or not you ever open the terminal, because it runs on Ballista’s servers rather than in any client.
The one thing that is genuinely per-surface is where a feature is offered — the backtester only exists in the terminal, price alerts only in the extension. The account underneath is identical. See What Ballista does not do.

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Where Polymarket ends and Ballista begins

Ballista never matches a trade. It builds and signs an order and hands it to Polymarket’s central limit order book, which decides whether and at what price it fills. Market data, resolution and settlement are Polymarket’s too. What Ballista adds is everything around that: the wallet provisioning above, the copy-trading engine that watches other wallets and replicates their fills into your account, the backtester, the leaderboard, and the alerting.

Your key

What Export Keys gives you and what it controls.

Placing orders

How an order reaches the book.