What Canonical is

Say you want an AI agent to watch your positions and put together a trade when the moment is right. Or a script to run payroll on the first of every month. The useful part is easy. The scary part is that doing it the normal way means handing software your private keys — and one bad move, one wrong address, and the money is gone. Crypto does not do refunds.

Canonical is a wallet built around that exact fear.

It runs on your own computer and keeps your keys to itself. Agents and scripts can ask it to do things — draft a transfer, prepare a swap — but they cannot sign anything. You do. And the wallet only signs after the people you have chosen say yes.

So an agent can do the busywork of preparing a transaction at 3am, and it simply waits in your inbox until you approve it over coffee. If that agent goes haywire, the worst it can do is queue up a transaction you will delete.

That is the whole idea: let automation touch your money without ever trusting it with your money.

Two things, both on your own machine:

• a background program that holds your keys and does the signing — the wallet itself, and
• a command you type to talk to it.

There is no app to open, no window, no account to sign up for, and no company holding anything for you. Nothing phones home. If this project disappeared tomorrow, your installed wallet would keep working exactly the same.

That independence is the trade you are making. You get complete control — and complete responsibility. Lose your backup phrase and no one, including us, can get your money back. That is not a flaw to fix; it is what "your keys" means.

Because a key is all-or-nothing. Whoever holds it can drain the wallet, and there is no taking it back. An agent that is brilliant 99% of the time is still one prompt injection, one hallucinated address, or one bad tool call away from a catastrophe you cannot undo.

Canonical splits that in half. The agent gets to be useful — reading balances, watching the chain, drafting transactions — with none of the danger, because it never gets the one thing that can actually move funds. The dangerous power stays with you, and (if you want) with the other people who share the wallet.

It is a good fit if you are comfortable in a terminal and you want automation, or a team, working with real funds under real control:

• an operator who would rather run one trustworthy wallet than paste keys into scripts,
• a small team that wants two people to sign off before money moves,
• a developer wiring AI agents into on-chain workflows.

It is the wrong tool if you want to tap a phone app to send crypto to a friend. There is no graphical app — that is a deliberate choice, not a missing feature. It runs on macOS and Linux (on Windows, inside WSL2).

• New here? How it works shows the one idea everything else is built on, in a single picture.
• Ready to try it? Jump to Install and Quickstart.
• Want the vocabulary first? Core concepts defines every term the rest of the docs use.