Your wallet
OPALE opens a real Bitcoin wallet for you when you create your account. Your funds live in that wallet, and OPALE looks after the keys to it on its servers, encrypted.
You can reveal your recovery phrase any time and take the wallet with you — paste the phrase into another Bitcoin wallet (Sparrow, Electrum, hardware wallets, etc.) and you have full control of the funds outside OPALE.
This page explains the model: what’s where, why it’s built that way, and what it implies for your risk.
The honest framing
Section titled “The honest framing”- OPALE is custodial — the keys to your wallet live on OPALE infrastructure.
- It is not self-custody. It is not “your keys, your coins.”
- It is not opaque either — you can read out your recovery phrase any time, and the wallet is a normal Bitcoin wallet you can use anywhere.
What’s stored where
Section titled “What’s stored where”| Asset | Stored on | Encryption |
|---|---|---|
| Recovery phrase (the master key to your wallet) | OPALE servers | Yes — encrypted at rest, with a key bound to your account so it can’t be silently swapped for someone else’s |
| Public Bitcoin addresses | OPALE servers | Plain (public information) |
| Order history | OPALE servers | Plain (your activity) |
Your recovery phrase is never logged and never sent back to you over the network in plain text. When you reveal it from 💰 Wallet → 🔑 Export Private Key, the message is encrypted in transit by Telegram and stays in your chat under your account.
Take your wallet with you
Section titled “Take your wallet with you”- Tap 💰 Wallet.
- Tap 🔑 Export Private Key.
- Write the recovery phrase down somewhere safe — paper in a fireproof spot, a metal backup, a steel plate. Don’t screenshot it. Don’t paste it into a notes app or cloud storage.
- To use the wallet outside OPALE: paste the phrase into Sparrow, Electrum, Blue Wallet, a hardware wallet, or any standard Bitcoin wallet that supports recovery phrases. Your OPALE deposit address should appear inside the imported wallet — that’s how you confirm it worked.
If you ever want to leave OPALE entirely, the recovery phrase is what you’d use.
Why it’s built this way
Section titled “Why it’s built this way”Holding the keys server-side is what makes the Telegram experience work:
- No signing in chat. You don’t have to approve every trade in a separate wallet — OPALE signs trades, sends and withdrawals on your behalf after you tap ✅ Confirm.
- Instant feedback. Quotes, fee previews and balance updates land in chat without waiting on a separate wallet round-trip.
- One less class of mistakes. Most people lose more to forgotten phrases and wrong-transaction signing than to platform risk. OPALE removes that whole class — at the cost of having to trust OPALE.
The trade-off is explicit: you trust OPALE with the keys in exchange for speed and a simpler UX. If at any point that trust isn’t worth it for the size you’re trading, export the phrase and move funds to a self-custody wallet.
How OPALE reduces operational risk
Section titled “How OPALE reduces operational risk”- Each wallet has its own encryption key, separate from every other user’s. A leak of one user’s encrypted blob can’t be used to read another user’s.
- Encrypted blobs are bound to your account. A wallet ciphertext can’t be quietly substituted for another user’s.
- Keys never sit unencrypted on disk. They’re decrypted only inside a signing call and the working memory is wiped when the call returns.
- Append-only audit log. Every change to an order writes both the new state and an audit row in the same transaction. Nothing mutates state without an audit trail.
These reduce risk; they don’t eliminate it.
Ordinals & rare sats — Protected UTXOs
Section titled “Ordinals & rare sats — Protected UTXOs”OPALE only trades Universal Protocol tokens (the OP_RETURN family). It does not support Ordinals inscriptions or rare sats trading. But if your imported wallet already holds an inscription, or someone deposits an inscription-bearing UTXO to your OPALE address by mistake, you need a way to keep it safe.
OPALE detects those UTXOs and refuses to spend them in any trading flow — they won’t fund a buy, a send, a sweep, or a withdrawal. They show up under 💰 Wallet → 🔒 Protected UTXOs, where you can review the inscription and send each one individually to an Ordinals-aware wallet (Xverse, Sparrow, Leather, etc.).
A few things to keep in mind:
- The Ordinals-aware destination matters. A regular wallet may treat the UTXO as plain BTC and lose the inscription. OPALE warns you about this before broadcast — but the choice of destination is yours.
- The detection covers inscribed sats (which catches the vast majority of valued rare sats). Un-inscribed naked rare sats are not detected — if you care about those, manage them outside OPALE.
- Protected balance does not count toward your spendable balance shown in trading screens. The Wallet view surfaces it on a separate line so the totals add up.
What you should do
Section titled “What you should do”- Treat your OPALE balance like a balance on an exchange. Don’t keep more there than you’re comfortable trusting OPALE with.
- Reveal your recovery phrase early and store it offline before you deposit anything significant. With the phrase, you have the same control over the wallet that OPALE does.
- Keep your Telegram account secure — Telegram 2FA on, no shared sessions. Access to your Telegram account is access to your OPALE account.
- Withdraw long-term holdings to a wallet you control. OPALE is built for active trading; cold storage is what hardware wallets are for.
What you should not expect
Section titled “What you should not expect”- OPALE will not describe itself as self-custody, “your keys, your coins,” or non-custodial. The keys are on OPALE infrastructure.
- OPALE cannot recover funds sent to a wrong address from another wallet — Bitcoin transfers are irreversible. Always copy the deposit address fresh from 💰 Wallet.
- OPALE does not insure your funds. There is no guarantee fund.