Is a Lending Bot Safe?

When you connect a Bitfinex API key, Hahalend checks its permissions before saving anything. Only two are ever accepted: Read, so it can see your balance and lending history, and Funding, so it can place and cancel lending offers. If the key also has Withdraw or Trading switched on, the connection is rejected on the spot — you'd need to go back to Bitfinex and turn those off first, then reconnect.

This isn't a policy written on a page somewhere; it's a check that runs in code every time a key is added, with no manual override. There is no path to running a bot with a key that's able to move funds out of your account.

Your key and secret are encrypted with AES-256-GCM before they're ever written to the database. What's actually stored is ciphertext, not your real key — even direct access to the database wouldn't reveal anything usable on its own.

When Hahalend's server needs to check your balance or place a lending offer, it decrypts the key in memory for that one operation and uses it immediately. It's not written back to disk in plain text at any point, and it's never included in logs.

Even in the worst case — Hahalend's own servers being fully compromised — the stored keys are still ciphertext, and Bitfinex enforces the Withdraw/Trading restriction on its own side, regardless of who's holding the key. That protection doesn't depend on Hahalend staying secure; it's built into what the key is allowed to do at all.

The one honest edge case: if an attacker also obtained the separate encryption key needed to unlock stored credentials, they could see your balances and history, and could place or cancel lending offers in your account. They still could not move funds out of Bitfinex. That's a real distinction, not a marketing line — it comes from how Bitfinex's own permission system works, not from a promise layered on top of it.

Some lending products work by taking custody of your funds — you deposit into their pool, and they lend it out on your behalf, often mixed with other users' money. Hahalend deliberately doesn't work that way. Your funds never leave your own Bitfinex account, and Hahalend's only access is the same Funding-permission API that you could use yourself, just automated.

That design choice is also the reason for every limit described on this page: because Hahalend never takes custody, it doesn't need — and doesn't want — a key that could withdraw. The safety here isn't a policy decision that could change; it follows from what the key is allowed to do.

This isn't a claim that lending is risk-free or that returns are guaranteed. Funding rates rise and fall with market demand — some periods pay noticeably less than others — and Bitfinex as a platform carries the same general exchange risk as any other centralized exchange, independent of whether you're running a bot.

2-step verification (2FA) is optional on your Hahalend account. It's not required to use the bot, but it's the single easiest thing you can do to protect account access itself, separate from anything the API key controls.