Permissions & Limits#

Ava can act in two ways, and each has its own boundary:

• Manual — Ava prepares a transaction and you sign it in your own wallet. The boundary is your signature: nothing moves unless you sign.
• Auto (optional) — Ava acts on its own from a separate Ava smart wallet you fund, under an agent permission you sign for that wallet. Your own wallet stays in your control: Auto can only use what you put in the smart wallet, and you can withdraw it anytime.

The rest of this page is about Auto, because that's where Ava acts without a signature each time.

Where Auto runs#

Auto runs from an Ava smart wallet — a separate smart account that your main wallet owns. You fund it with only what you want Ava to use (Deposit on the Wallets page in Ava Studio) and Withdraw what's in it back to your main wallet anytime. Anything Auto has put into a protocol, such as Aave collateral, has to come out of that position first, and collateral backing a loan needs the loan repaid. Your main wallet is never upgraded or delegated, and Ava can't touch what stays in it.

Running Auto directly on your existing wallet isn't available yet. See Smart Wallets.

The two kinds of permission#

The standard permission. When an Auto action needs a permission, Ava offers the standard one: a single signature per smart wallet and chain. It lets Ava approve, send and revoke the main tokens on that chain (USDC, USDT, DAI, WETH, WBTC, LINK and UNI where available), wrap and unwrap ETH, swap on Uniswap V3 and use the Aave V3 pool from the smart wallet, with no spending limit, for 365 days.

Narrower permissions. If you'd rather set limits, turn off the standard permission on the Wallets page and choose permissions one by one: Send ERC-20 tokens, Uniswap V3 swaps and Aave V3. Each one has:

• The contracts it allows, with addresses you can check on a block explorer.
• A total spending limit on the token you choose. For example, up to 500 USDC. It's a running total over the permission's life — it doesn't refill. It covers that token only: the Uniswap V3 and Aave V3 permissions also let Ava approve WETH without a limit (Uniswap can also wrap and unwrap ETH), and borrowing or withdrawing on Aave isn't a token spend, so the limit doesn't cap those.
• An expiry. 1 day, 7 days, 30 days (the default), or a date you pick.

Either way, a permission is for one chain, and the smart wallet enforces it on-chain: a call to a contract it doesn't cover, spending past a limit it sets, or any use after it expires is refused by the chain, not just by Ava. Ava's job runner also refuses to run a job without a valid permission.

Signing a permission is a signature, not a transaction, so it costs no gas. Ava can't create or widen a permission itself — only your signature can.

Everything Auto does runs under a permission#

That includes one-off actions you ask for in chat (you still tap Confirm) and standing jobs that run on a schedule without asking each time:

• Health-factor protection — checks your Aave position every hour and repays debt or adds collateral when it gets risky.
• Recurring pay and swaps — scheduled transfers or purchases.

Revoke the permission and Ava stops using it for every job and action that relied on it.

Be precise about what a permission covers#

A permission is scoped to an app, not to individual functions, and a job's amount isn't an on-chain limit:

• The Aave V3 access covers supply, withdraw, borrow, repay and collateral settings on the Aave V3 pool. Ava doesn't borrow or withdraw unless you ask it to, but that's how Ava behaves — the permission itself doesn't block those functions.
• Sending tokens isn't tied to a recipient on-chain. The recipient is set in the job or request you confirm.
• A repayment rule that repays 300 USDC doesn't limit the permission to 300 USDC. Only a narrower permission's spending limit does that, and only for the token it names.

The bound that always holds is the smart wallet's balance: Auto can only use what you put in it. Spending limits, where you set them, cap what Ava is authorized to spend. Neither caps losses on your DeFi positions, which carry market risk of their own.

Seeing your permissions#

In Ava Studio, open Wallets, pick your Ava smart wallet, and choose Edit permissions. The Agent permissions window shows the standard permission (what it covers and when it ends) or, for narrower permissions:

• A plain-English summary of what Ava is authorized to do on that network.
• The allowed contracts, each linked to a block explorer.
• The spending limit on the token you chose.
• The expiry date.
• Enable or Disable, per network.

Changing a permission#

Each change is a new signature from your main wallet. Studio combines the permissions you enable on a wallet and network into one shared permission. Raising a limit, adding a capability or extending the expiry all mean signing again. To switch from the standard permission to narrower ones, turn the standard permission off first.

Stopping Ava#

• One job: pause it on the Running page.
• A permission: turn it off on Wallets — Ava stops using it for every job and action that relied on it.
• What Auto can spend right now: Withdraw from your Ava smart wallet. With nothing in it, there's nothing for Ava to spend. Withdrawing moves funds; it doesn't turn off the permission or stop jobs, so anything you deposit later is reachable again.

See Revoking Access for the step-by-step.