Auto runs from a separate Ava smart wallet you fund — how it relates to your main wallet, what it enforces, and how to get your funds back.
In Auto mode, Ava acts from a smart wallet — a smart-contract wallet (also called a smart account) that can check every call against the agent permission you sign. Your main wallet is the one you already use (sometimes called an EOA, an ordinary key-based account). Read-only and Manual mode don't need a smart wallet: in Manual, you sign every transaction in your own wallet.
You set up a separate Ava smart wallet (Ava's is an ERC-4337 account) that your main wallet owns, fund it with the assets you want Ava to use (Deposit on the Wallets page in Ava Studio), and sign its permission. Your main holdings stay in your main wallet, which is never upgraded or delegated.
That gives Auto a hard boundary: Ava can only use what you put in the smart wallet. You can Withdraw what's in it anytime, and withdrawals always go back to your main wallet. 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.
If you already have an Aave position on your main wallet, you don't need to move it: health-factor protection repays or supplies on its behalf, paid from the smart wallet.
Running Auto directly on your existing wallet — a one-time EIP-7702 upgrade that would let it hold agent permissions under the same address — isn't available yet. Until it is, never sign a wallet upgrade that claims to be for Ava: a 7702 upgrade to an unknown contract is a known way wallets get drained.
An Ava smart wallet is a new smart account created on-chain for you. It's Alchemy's Modular Account v2, a standard ERC-4337 smart account, owned by your main wallet.
The smart wallet enforces your agent permission, for one-off Auto actions and standing jobs alike: a call outside what the permission allows, spending past a limit it sets, or any use after it expires is refused by the chain. The standard permission has no spending limit, so the smart wallet's balance is the ceiling; narrower permissions add a limit on the token you choose. Ava can't create or widen a permission — only a signature from your main wallet installs one. See Permissions & Limits.
Your Ava smart wallet inherits security from your main wallet's keys, because your main wallet owns it. If you lose your main wallet, the recovery model depends on that wallet's own recovery (e.g. social recovery if you used a recovery-enabled wallet, or your seed phrase otherwise).
We do not custody a recovery path. There is no "email reset" for your wallet, by design.
Your Ava smart wallet is owned by your main wallet, and its permissions are signed by your main wallet — not by your Telegram account. Telegram is the chat surface; the wallet is the source of truth.