Gate Gives You a Dropdown Per Permission. Here's How to Set Them.

Most exchanges give you three checkboxes. Gate gives you a list of scopes, each with its own dropdown, each offering Read Only or Read and Write, and no obvious guidance about which ones a portfolio tracker actually uses.

That is more control than anywhere else in the top tier, and more ways to end up with a key that either sees too little or grants more than you meant. Worth ten minutes to get right once.

Why does Gate want my fund password just to read a balance?

Before you reach the permission screen, Gate asks for two-factor authentication and your fund password, the one you set for withdrawals. This alarms people, reasonably, because the whole point of a read-only key is that withdrawals are off the table.

The request is about proving you are you, not about what the key will be allowed to do. Gate classifies API key creation as a sensitive account action alongside changing security settings, and gates it behind the strongest credential you have. The permissions themselves are set separately, on the form, by you. A key issued with Withdraw at None cannot withdraw no matter what password you typed to create it.

That distinction is the foundation of the whole arrangement. Permission checking happens at Gate, not inside the app you paste the key into. An order signed with a key carrying no trading scope comes back as a refusal from Gate's servers. Read-only API keys covers why that makes this a smaller decision than it feels like.

APIv2 or APIv4?

Gate still offers both, and the choice is not cosmetic.

APIv2 is the legacy format. It covers spot only, and Gate allows exactly one APIv2 key per account, so generating a new one immediately expires the old one. If you have two services using APIv2 keys, setting up the second one silently breaks the first. That failure is confusing enough on its own to be worth avoiding.

APIv4 is the current format, covering spot, margin and contract trading, and you can hold several keys simultaneously. This is what you want, and it is what any current tracker will expect. Choose it in the API key type selector, then pick the account type the key should target.

Which scopes do I set to Read Only, and which to None?

Gate's creation dialog lists the scopes as separate rows. The exact set depends on which products your account has enabled, but the pattern is consistent: give read access where you hold value, and None where you do not.

1. Account: Read Only. This is the scope that reports your overall account state, and a tracker without it sees very little.
2. Wallet: Read Only. Balances and transfer records. Do not set this to Read and Write, which is what the Cobo-style integration guides ask for because those tools genuinely move funds. A tracker does not.
3. Spot Trade: Read Only. Holdings and fill history.
4. Perpetual Futures and Delivery Futures: Read Only if you hold positions there, None if you do not.
5. Options: Read Only only if you trade them.
6. Unified Account: Read Only, if your account is on the unified model. Skip it on classic.
7. Subaccount: Read Only if you want sub-account visibility, though a dedicated key per sub-account is more reliable.
8. Withdraw: None. Always. No portfolio tool has any use for it, and this is the only permission on the list that can actually cost you money.

Anything not on that list, and Gate exposes a fair few, stays at None. The rule is narrow by default: grant a scope because you hold something in it, not because it was offered.

Read and Write is the setting to avoid everywhere. Trading permission stays off, withdrawal permission stays off, and what you are left with is a read-only key that cannot move funds. It can tell an app what you own. It cannot buy, sell, or send a single coin anywhere, and Gate refuses those requests at its own end rather than leaving the decision to the software holding the key.

If you tick the wrong thing, delete the key and make another rather than editing it. It takes seconds and it removes the question of what the key was originally issued with. When you later stop using a service, revoke its key at Gate rather than just disconnecting in the app, which is covered in is it safe to connect an exchange.

Am I reading a classic account or a unified account?

This determines what "my Gate balance" even means, and it is the most common source of a number that looks wrong.

A classic account keeps assets segregated by product. Spot in the spot account, isolated margin in its own account, futures in the futures account, options separately again. Each holds its own balance and you move funds between them by hand. A tracker sums what it can read across those containers, and anything sitting in a container you did not grant read access to is simply absent.

A unified account shares collateral across products, and the details depend on the margin mode you selected. In multi-currency and portfolio margin modes, the USD value of several coins backs positions across spot, cross margin, perpetuals and options together. Gate's own comparison of the two models sets out which products each mode includes.

Then comes the wrinkle that catches serious Gate users. Under the unified model, flexible Simple Earn subscriptions can serve as margin collateral. An asset can therefore be earning yield and backing an open position at the same instant, which makes the question "is this in Earn or in my trading balance" genuinely ambiguous rather than just badly reported. If your tracked total sits below your Gate total, that overlap is where to look first. Tracking staked and locked assets covers how to record positions that resist a clean balance read.

What will not come across?

Structured products, dual investment, HODL and Earn subscriptions and Startup launchpad commitments live outside the ordinary balance view. They are yours, they are just not reported as spot holdings, and they usually need a manual entry to appear in your total.

The Gate Web3 wallet is self-custody and entirely outside the exchange account, so no API key reaches it. Add those public addresses as watched wallets instead.

Trade history depth is bounded by what Gate's API returns to a new connection, so a key created today reconstructs recent activity rather than years of it. If you need the full record for cost basis, pull it from Gate's own export before you rely on the sync. Exporting your data covers doing that in a form you can actually reuse.

And a leaked read-only key is a privacy problem, not a custody one. Whoever holds it can see what you own and what you have traded, which is worth protecting; they cannot place an order or take a coin off the platform, because those permissions were never attached. What a tracker can see is the honest inventory.

Set the scopes once, bind an IP, and the Gate connection stops needing attention. The moment worth revisiting it is the day you switch your account to a different margin mode, because that changes what the same read scopes report, and the number will move for reasons that have nothing to do with the market. Auditing your tracker is the twenty-minute version of that check.