From question to order: drafting trades and checking positions in chat

A trader types an instruction, such as “buy 0.1 ETH at market.” Hippo drafts it on its own order ticket inside the chat, showing market, side, type, quantity, estimated fill and fees. Nothing happens until the trader confirms. Hippo then submits the order through the exchange’s API. Traders can also ask to see their positions and open orders without leaving the conversation.

This is the step from understanding to acting. A trader reads a research answer, decides, and acts in the same place. The rest of this post covers how that works and where the line sits.

How does a sentence become an order?

Three steps, every time.

1. Hippo reads the instruction. It identifies the market, the side, the order type and the size. If something is missing, such as a limit price, it asks.
2. Hippo drafts the ticket. The draft appears as a card in the chat with every field filled in and the effect on the trader’s account shown.
3. The trader confirms or changes it. Confirm submits. Anything else leaves the order unsent.

The vocabulary is deliberate. Hippo drafts. The trader confirms. Hippo submits through the exchange’s API. At no point does Hippo decide to trade.

What is on the ticket?

Field	Example (illustrative)
Market	ETH/USDT
Side	Buy
Type	Market
Quantity	0.1000 ETH
Estimated fill	≈ $298.42
Estimated fees	≈ $0.30
Balance after	Shown in the quote currency

A relative instruction becomes a number. “Sell half my SOL” with 40 SOL in the account shows 20.0000 SOL on the ticket. The trader confirms a figure they can check, not a phrase Hippo interpreted.

For derivatives, the ticket also carries leverage, margin mode, and stop-loss and take-profit if the trader asked for them. Every field is covered in what an AI-drafted order ticket must show.

Why is confirmation mandatory?

Because it keeps the trader in control and keeps Hippo on the information side of the line. An agent that could trade on its own would be making decisions. Hippo does not make decisions; it drafts what the trader asked for and shows exactly what it will do.

There is no setting to skip confirmation, for any trader or any exchange. The argument for that design is in why confirm-by-default matters for AI order flow.

Two more limits hold alongside it:

• Hippo never suggests an order the trader did not ask for. Once the trader has decided, it can draft what they asked for; it never proposes what to trade.
• Hippo never moves funds. No withdrawals, deposits or transfers. It submits confirmed orders, and that is all.

Positions and open orders in chat

The same panel answers “what am I holding?” A trader can ask for:

• Open positions, with entry, size, leverage and unrealised profit and loss
• Open orders, with price, quantity and status
• Balances by asset

In a pilot, these come from the exchange’s own account data, so they match what the exchange’s screens show. A trader can go from “how is my ETH position doing?” to “close half of it” without opening another page, and the close is drafted on the ticket for confirmation like any other order.

What changes in a pilot

On Hippo’s demo exchange, the whole flow runs today: question, draft, confirm, fill. Connecting to a real exchange’s order system is part of the pilot. That is where Hippo is wired to the exchange’s order API and tested against its instruments, order types and rules.

What this means for the exchange

Every confirmed order is an order on the exchange’s book, placed by the exchange’s own customer, confirmed in the exchange’s own app. Nothing routes elsewhere. For product teams, the useful pilot measures are how many conversations reach a drafted ticket, how many drafts are confirmed, and whether traders use order types they had not used before.

If you run product or growth at an exchange or broker, askthehippo.com has more on how a pilot works.