Tracking Bitget After the Unified Account Changed the API Screen

Half the Bitget instructions on the internet are describing a page that no longer looks like that.

Bitget spent the last stretch moving users onto its Unified Trading Account, and the migration did not just merge some balances. It rewrote the permission labels on the API creation form. So you follow a confident-looking guide, go hunting for a checkbox called "Spot" with a read-only radio next to it, find nothing resembling it, and conclude the exchange has broken. It has not. You are on a different account model than the person who wrote the guide.

Sorting out which model you are on takes about ten seconds and makes everything after it obvious.

Which Bitget account model am I on?

Bitget's classic account keeps assets in separate containers by purpose. A fiat account, a spot account, a margin account and a futures account, each holding its own balance, each requiring a manual transfer before you can use funds somewhere else. Want to open a futures position with USDT sitting in spot? You move it first.

The Unified Trading Account collapses that into a single trading balance where multiple coins count as collateral across products, with borrowing and repayment handled automatically. The fiat account stays separate; everything else consolidates.

For a portfolio tracker this matters less than it sounds, because either way the API reports what you hold. Where it bites is the setup screen. On classic, permissions are expressed per module, with a read-only or read-write choice applied to the parts of the account you tick. Under the unified model, Bitget's API documentation describes permissions worded as unified account trade and unified account management, each available in a read-only form and a read-and-write form. Same underlying idea, different vocabulary, and the vocabulary is why people get stuck.

You want the read-only variants. Both of them. Trade and management read-only together give a tracker the balance data and the position data it needs, and neither can place an order.

How do I create the key, and what do I switch off?

Go to your account settings and open API key management. Bitget puts it under the profile area on the web interface, and the direct route is the API management page in your account. Choose to create a new key, give it a label naming the app you are connecting, and work down the form.

The read-only choice comes first, before any module selection, and it is the whole ballgame. Once a key is read-only it cannot place an order, cannot cancel one, cannot change margin settings and cannot withdraw, because Bitget enforces that at its own servers rather than trusting the app holding the key. The app you paste the credentials into does not get a vote. That enforcement model is the reason connecting an exchange is a smaller decision than it feels like, and read-only API keys sets out why in detail.

Withdraw stays off. Transfer stays off, even though transfer only shuffles money between accounts you already own and sounds harmless. On Bitget, withdrawal permission requires a bound IP address before it will function at all, which is the exchange telling you something about how it rates that permission.

Then set your passphrase. Bitget generates the key and the secret; the passphrase is yours to invent, and it forms part of the signature on every request. Bitget states plainly that a forgotten passphrase cannot be retrieved and the key has to be recreated. Record all three at the moment of creation, because the secret is shown once.

If you tick something wrong, do not edit the key afterwards. Delete it and start again. It costs thirty seconds and removes any doubt about what the key actually carries.

What does copy trading do to my portfolio numbers?

This is the Bitget-specific problem, and it is worth understanding before you decide the tracker is undercounting.

Copy trading is central to Bitget in a way it is not on most venues. If you follow elite traders, the margin backing those copied positions is committed inside the copy trading structure rather than sitting as a spot balance you can read off. The positions open and close on someone else's timing, the profit and loss accrues per position, and a portfolio tool reading account balances sees the collateral rather than a clean list of holdings you chose.

Two consequences follow. First, your tracked total may sit below your Bitget total while positions are open, and that is a reporting gap rather than a missing-funds problem. Second, the profit figure means something different here. Realised gains from a copied position behave like closed trades, not like an appreciating holding, and mixing the two in one performance number produces something that flatters or punishes you at random. Unrealised vs. realised profit is worth reading before you draw conclusions from a Bitget performance chart.

The practical answer for most people is to record copy trading collateral as a manual position and let the automatic sync handle spot. Adding a manual position covers doing that without wrecking your cost basis. It is not elegant. It is accurate, which matters more.

What else will not come across?

Bitget Wallet is the big one. Formerly BitKeep, it is self-custody software with its own recovery phrase, and no exchange API key reaches it. Add those public addresses as watched wallets instead.

Earn subscriptions, PoolX and launchpool commitments sit outside the standard balance view in the same way staked assets do everywhere. Sub-accounts issue their own keys, and the master key does not read them, so a sub-account you use to separate strategies needs its own connection. And trade history depth is bounded by what Bitget's API returns, meaning a fresh connection reconstructs recent activity rather than your full history.

None of that is unique to Bitget except the copy trading wrinkle. What is unique is how much of Bitget's product surface sits in that copy trading structure, which is why the gap between the exchange total and the tracked total tends to be larger here than on a pure spot venue. Why your exchange app and your tracker disagree covers the general version of that argument.

A leaked read-only key exposes what you hold and what you traded. It cannot take a coin off the platform, because the permission to do that was never attached. Is it safe to connect an exchange is the honest version of that risk, including the parts that are genuinely worth caring about.

Once the key is live, the useful next move on Bitget specifically is alerting rather than checking. Copied positions change while you are asleep, and a wallet transaction alert or a pump alert on the assets you are exposed to tells you something moved without requiring you to open anything.