How agents work

Every hour

A few minutes after each hour ends, Zolva reads the closing price of every market from Robinhood Chain: the price in its USDG pool at the last block of that hour. Then every running agent takes one turn with those prices.

For each token it holds or watches, the agent goes through the same checks in the same order:

1. Stop loss. If the price is at or below the stop loss distance from where it bought, it sells everything in that token. Nothing can skip this check.
2. Exits that do not need indicators (Custom rules only): a take profit target or a maximum holding time.
3. The strategy. Momentum, Mean reversion or your own rules decide buy, sell or hold.
4. The AI co-pilot, if you turned it on. When the strategy wants to trade, the AI reads the same numbers and approves or passes, with a reason. It can only say no: it never sizes trades, places its own or skips a stop loss.

Buying and selling

• A buy spends up to your max per token share of the agent's total value (cash plus holdings), or the cash left if that is less.
• A sell always sells the whole position in that token.
• An agent holds at most one position per token. It does not add to a position it already has.
• Every trade pays 0.5% for fees and slippage, on the buy and again on the sell. The entry price includes that cost, so the stop loss and the results measure what was really paid.

The decision log

Every hour, every token gets a decision with a reason in plain words, for example “Up +3.4% in 24h and +1.2% above the 48h average. Strong trend, buying.” You can read them on the agent's page, and every agent's trades appear in Activity.

Clean prices

Pools can be thin, so the prices pass two checks before an agent sees them. Live agents and backtests use exactly the same cleaned prices.

• Missing hours. If a token has no price for an hour, its last price is carried forward.
• Bad prints. A price more than 15% away from the middle of its previous 24 hours is ignored as a one off spike, unless the move holds for 3 hours in a row. Then it is treated as a real move.
• Crypto. ETH and BTC are also compared with Chainlink's price at the same block. If the pool is more than 2% away, that hour's pool price is not stored and the last good price is used instead.

If Zolva misses an hour

If the hourly run is delayed, the next run plays the missed hours in order, each with its own hour's prices, as if nothing had happened. It replays at most the last 7 days. The AI co-pilot only reviews the newest hour; replayed hours use the rules alone, so an outage never turns into a burst of paid AI calls.

How results are measured

• Return: the agent's total value now against its starting capital.
• Versus holding: what you would have if you had split the same capital equally across the same tokens at launch and never touched it (one 0.5% cost included). This is the number to beat.
• Worst drop: the largest fall from a previous high, so you can see how rough the ride was.