Signing and approvals
11. Managing strategies, alerts and settings before enabling unattended signing.
Every automated trade passes an automatic transaction guard in your browser before a strategy wallet signs it, rejecting anything outside the strategy's budget. By default that is the only gate — Automate signing is on, so strategies trade without you clicking anything. Turn it off and a Signing Approval window waits for your click on every trade instead.
The Signing Approval window
With Automate signing off, whenever a strategy wants to sign a transaction a window appears showing:
which strategy and wallet is asking (a context badge);
the full signing address and recipient address — deliberately not shortened, because a look-alike address only needs to match the visible ends;
the maximum ADA the transaction can spend;
any extra details for that transaction type and a warning strip.
Choose Approve, Decline, Decline all (clears the whole queue) or Minimize. Requests queue up if several arrive; a pill in the header shows how many are waiting and reopens a minimized window.
Declining is safe — nothing is signed. What happens next: a rule-based level is re-armed after 2 minutes; a Cadence order is released and retried; an arbitrage opportunity is left for you to skip or sign later, and expires 2 minutes after detection; a declined grid rung stays "pending sign" until your tab next reconnects to the strategy, which resets it to armed (reload the strategy page).
Automate signing
Settings → General → Automate signing. On by default: strategy transactions that pass the transaction guard are signed immediately with no prompt, so a strategy runs unattended as long as the tab stays open. Manual swaps and sends from your browser wallet are unaffected — the extension still prompts.
Turn it off if you want to see and approve every trade — useful while you are learning what a strategy does. The setting is reset to its default whenever you disconnect your wallet, so the next wallet never inherits a previous choice.
The transaction guard
Before any strategy wallet key is touched, Surge decodes the transaction it was asked to sign and refuses it if it:
spends more ADA to outside addresses than the strategy's spend cap (the trade size plus a 10 ADA allowance for fees and deposits);
moves any token out of the wallet that the strategy did not declare it would sell — tokens are deny by default;
contains staking or delegation changes;
withdraws staking rewards;
mints or burns anything;
has a fee of zero or an implausibly large fee;
returns no change to the signing wallet.
Transfers between your own strategy wallets count as change, not spend, so the Cadence strategy's wallet rotation passes. A refused transaction is never signed; the strategy logs the refusal and the trade is skipped.
The spend cap is derived from the strategy's own settings: the rung budget for a grid, the level size for a rule-based plan, the maximum trade size for Cadence, and the trade size for DCA. [VERIFY: how the cap is derived for arbitrage legs.] Order cancels are capped at the locked value plus 10 ADA.
What the guard does not do
It does not judge whether a trade is a good idea, and it does not check the price. Those are the strategy's job. It also cannot protect keys from a compromised browser — see Wallets in Surge.
Where else you sign
Login
Browser wallet
Extension's "sign data" prompt (a message, not a transaction)
Fund a strategy wallet
Browser wallet
Extension prompt
Manual swap from browser wallet
Browser wallet
Extension prompt
Manual swap from a strategy wallet
Strategy wallet
Transaction guard only — no approval window, because you initiated it
Send from a strategy wallet
Strategy wallet
Transaction guard only
Cancel a stuck order
The wallet that owns the order
Extension prompt or transaction guard, depending on the wallet
Strategy trade
Strategy wallet
Transaction guard; Signing Approval only if you turned Automate signing off
Register a new strategy wallet
The new strategy wallet
None — it signs an ownership challenge, not a transaction
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