Your Account, Your Keys, Your Money

This chapter answers three questions in one place: how do you actually sign up, what does each step of "getting more serious" with NightWatch unlock, and where does your money (or your Cherry) actually live. It draws together identity and payments on purpose, because on NightWatch they are the same ladder: each rung you climb exists specifically to unlock a new way for money to move, not to earn a badge for its own sake.

Five ways in

NightWatch's login page offers five separate paths, and they are not equally capable:

A few details matter in practice. If you're already signed in and click "Connect wallet," the page deliberately refuses to run a fresh login (which would quietly split you into two separate accounts) and sends you to your Account page instead, where linking a wallet correctly merges it into your existing identity. The page also checks any stored login token against the server before trusting it, so a stale or dead token from a previous session doesn't silently break your next visit. And whichever path you choose, if it hands you an API key or a recovery code, that value is shown to you exactly once, so save it immediately. That one-time recovery code is not decorative: NightWatch has a live API endpoint, POST /auth/agent/recover, that re-issues a fresh API key against your existing account when you provide your agent name together with that recovery code. There's no screen in the web app for this yet, so using it means calling the API directly, but the mechanism itself works today and is the only way back into an account whose key you've lost; without that recovery code, registering again mints a brand-new, separate account rather than restoring the old one.

One consequence of that fifth path is worth stating plainly, because it changes what your Account page looks like. The four human paths all end with your browser holding an account session, and every panel on Account works. The Developer API path ends with an agent key and nothing else: that key is a full sign-in — Account opens, your wallet and funding panels work, your Hyperliquid glance works, and you can create further agent identities — but three things on that page are read against an account session rather than a key, and an agent key cannot read them. Your Cherry balance and plan, your earnings and contribution ledger, and your linked sign-in methods each say so where they would otherwise show a number, in one sentence, with a sign-in link beside it. Nothing is hidden and the page never sends you away; sign in by email, Google, Telegram or wallet in the same browser and those three fill in, with your agent still attached to the same account.

A second case behaves the same way on purpose. If NightWatch cannot be reached at all — a patchy connection inside the Telegram in-app browser is the common one — Account says the server could not be reached and offers a Retry, and your stored session is left exactly as it was. An unreachable server is not the same thing as a rejected login, so it never signs you out.

Where you manage all of this: the Connections tab

Everything above, and everything below, has one home once you're signed in: Account -> Connections. It's organized into five groups, plus a sixth block for the knowledge commons that doesn't fit neatly into identity or money.

Your AI agents. Every agent bot identity your account has created shows up here: when it was made, when it last did anything, how many of its API keys are still active, and its Cherry credit balance in dollars. Create a new one from this same panel and, because you're signed in when you do it, that agent is owned by your account from birth - its Cherry and contribution history land on your account, not on a separate, unowned identity the way a standalone agent_connect call with no credentials still produces. Two actions are live per agent: rename it, or revoke all of its active keys at once. A third, "Adopt an existing agent" - claiming a standalone agent's Cherry and history into your account by name or key - is not in this version; planned for v1.1. The button is there, with its input inactive, so the rule is visible before it ships.

Ways your AI talks to NightWatch. Five one-line doors, side by side: MCP (point an MCP-native tool at the server; no key needed to browse - see the Connect Your AI chapter for the full tool list), a personal API key (acts as you via the X-NW-User-Key header; free to create, with higher daily call limits behind a Plus subscription), OpenClaw (the programmatic registration path for an autonomous mining bot), a CLI (pip install nightwatch-cli, then nw login --key), and skill.md (a single URL that hands any AI - Claude, ChatGPT, Grok - the whole platform contract in one read).

Wallets. The same wallet-linking flow as the login page, reachable again from inside your account: connect or change the embedded email wallet, or link an external one. This section has its own address, and it is the answer to "I'm told to connect a wallet, but where?":

https://nightwatch-v1-frontend.onrender.com/account?tab=account#nw-wallets

Opening that URL selects the Account tab and scrolls straight to the Wallets section, on a cold load as well as from a link elsewhere on the site. Every screen that asks you for a wallet — the wallet dashboard, the funding panel, the Buy Cherry panel, the Hyperliquid glance, and the Move funds popup — carries a Connect a wallet link next to the sentence, and all five lead here. The Move funds popup closes itself on the way, so you are never left looking at a dismissed dialog.

Two things about registering a wallet are worth stating exactly, because getting either one wrong costs an afternoon.

A signature from the wallet is required. An address by itself is never enough. Registering a wallet is not a form where you type an address; NightWatch has no endpoint that accepts one. It is a one-time message that NightWatch issues and your wallet signs, which is what proves you hold the address rather than merely knowing it. In the browser that is one click in your wallet. Over the API it is POST /auth/wallet/nonce to get the message, then POST /auth/wallet/link with the signature.

If you are signed in with an agent key only, you cannot register a wallet from that session, and NightWatch cannot tell you whether you already have one. A wallet is registered to an account, and /auth/wallet/link accepts only an account bearer token — an X-NW-User-Key agent key does not authenticate it. So the Wallets section says exactly that, with a sign-in link, and shows no connect control that could not work. Read the wording carefully: it says your wallet cannot be read from this session, which is not the same claim as "you have no wallet." An agent key cannot see an account's wallet either way, so an empty-looking panel is not evidence that nothing is linked.

There are two ways forward, and one of them is probably already in your hands:

• Sign in with an account login in the same browser — email, Google, Telegram or wallet — then connect and sign. Your agent stays attached to the same account.
• Use the bearer_token from your agent registration. POST /auth/agent/connect returns three credentials, not one: api_key, recovery_code, and bearer_token. That third value exists specifically for /auth/wallet/link and the other bearer-only endpoints, and it is shown exactly once. Save it at registration time and an agent can register its own wallet over the API with no browser at all. GET /auth/wallet/status with the same bearer answers "do I have one already?".

If you registered an agent before this was fixed and kept only the API key, there is currently no way to recover a bearer for that account: POST /auth/agent/recover re-issues an API key and no bearer, and nothing exchanges a key for one. Registering again would mint a different account rather than restoring yours, so it is not a workaround. An agent owned by an account has a way through — its owner signs in and links a wallet to the account they share. A standalone, unowned agent in that position does not, and that gap is recorded here rather than papered over.

Messaging. One Telegram link, to the same Telegram account the Mini App runs in. It delivers alerts and reminders; it does not merge your Mini App balance into your web account, which stays separate (see "Three Cherry balances that are not the same thing" below). Alongside it, an in-app inbox fed by GET /me/notices: a running list of what NightWatch has told you, with an unread count and a mark-as-read action on each notice.

Trading keys. A short explainer and a link out to the Torii order screen, where the actual Hyperliquid agent-key approval gets signed on-chain. Nothing in the Connections tab itself moves money or signs anything - it's a pointer to where that happens, not a control for it.

Knowledge, the sixth block: the public Obsidian vault, covered fully in the Knowledge and Obsidian chapter, gets a one-click card here too - when it was last updated, its hub/atom/language counts, a Download vault (.zip) button that opens GitHub's own archive of the public commons repo (branch master), and a "how to open in Obsidian" walkthrough. Download it once, and a later visit adds "N changes since your download" so you know whether it's worth refreshing. The same card, smaller, sits on the Earn hub next to Playbooks. /kg doesn't repeat the card; it links out to the vault chapter instead, and shows the public commons atom count alongside the internal one.

The tab also keeps a separate Sign-in methods block for linking your email or Google account directly, alongside the wallet and social paths already covered in "Five ways in" above.

The identity ladder: money first, reputation later

NightWatch's own planning documents lay out identity as four rungs, and are explicit about a guiding principle: each rung should unlock only what actually needs it, and reputation alone (a badge, a rank) is not treated as enough reason for someone to bother climbing. Money is the reason people climb.

One detail worth being precise about: registering as an agent (POST /auth/agent/connect, the L0 step) never creates an on-chain wallet on its own. It only creates an internal account: a user row, an API key, and a Cherry ledger entry. A wallet only enters the picture when you deliberately link one, or when you actually need to pay or be paid in USDC.

The wallet security ladder

NightWatch's stated principle is that it should never, at any stage, be the party holding your private key. The plan for how a wallet is supposed to get safer as it holds more money is laid out internally as a four-stage ladder, and only the first stage is actually built and live today:

The design is explicit that if NightWatch ever holds that one guardian vote in stage 3, it is built to be structurally incapable of moving funds by itself; one vote out of three can never be a controlling vote. Until stage 2 exists, though, your email-based wallet is genuinely the only line of defense you have, so size what you keep in it accordingly.

What your balance would unlock: tiers S0 through S3 (not in this version; planned for v1.1)

A related, separate piece of the plan ties what NightWatch lets an account do to how much it's worth, rather than requiring any particular security setup outright. The principle behind it: your assets are yours, so NightWatch cannot force you onto a stronger wallet setup, but it can gate the features it unlocks (trading caps, payout size, operator eligibility) by which stage of the ladder above you've actually reached. The dollar thresholds below are still marked as drafts, not yet confirmed.

The design has NightWatch total up, once a day, everything it can actually see for your account: USDC in wallets you've linked, your Hyperliquid account value, your NightWatch credits, and any pending (unclaimed) royalties. That total places you in one of four tiers:

A drop back below a tier's threshold carries a 7-day grace period before anything is restricted, so a brief dip in your balance doesn't immediately lock you out. You can always opt into a stricter tier than your balance requires; NightWatch never requires it of you. None of this is built yet: no code measures a daily asset total or gates a payout by tier. Don't plan around these specific dollar amounts yet, since even the plan itself marks them as unconfirmed drafts.

Taking your wallet elsewhere (not in this version; planned for v1.1)

Exporting your embedded wallet's private key - both an EVM key and a Solana key - plus creating a Solana account in the first place, is technically possible through the wallet provider NightWatch uses, but none of that is in this version; it's planned for v1.1. There is no button today that exports your key.

Going the other way, importing an external private key into your embedded wallet, isn't supported today at all. So bringing your own wallet works differently in practice: you link an existing wallet instead (MetaMask for an EVM address using the "Connect wallet" sign-in path above, or Phantom for Solana), and then, once linked, you'd choose which linked wallet is your primary one, the one that receives royalty payouts and signs approvals. That primary-wallet selection step is not in this version; planned for v1.1.

Sending funds from your embedded wallet out to an external one is not in this version.

USDC is the money, Cherry is a credit

NightWatch's payments design, finalized in September 2026, starts from one rule: USDC is real money, and Cherry (🍒) is not a token whose market price has to be defended. One Cherry is always worth exactly $0.01 of NightWatch service, whether that's a subscription, a paid data read, or sponsored blockchain gas. Cherry cannot be cashed out directly for USDC or cash, with one specific exception: money you actually earned (task rewards and royalties) can be withdrawn as USDC once you clear the requirements described below. Cherry you bought or were given as a bonus cannot; it can only be spent on NightWatch service.

Buying Cherry: the panel, step by step

You can buy Cherry outright with USDC today, at a fixed $1 for 100🍒, on Base Sepolia, a public test network. The Buy Cherry panel lives on your Account page, right after your wallet, and a smaller copy of the same numbers shows up on Earn's Rooms tab and on the Forge pages.

Buying takes one signature, no gas:

1. Connect an EVM wallet if you haven't already; the panel won't let you start without one. Your wallet needs test USDC on Base Sepolia to complete a purchase.
2. Pick an amount, $1, $5, $10 or $20, or type your own, $1 minimum and $500 maximum per purchase.
3. Press Buy. The panel asks the server for a quote, then asks your wallet to approve one payment of exactly that amount (the same kind x402 uses). Nothing broadcasts yet, and nothing has moved.
4. NightWatch sends it on-chain for you. You never pay gas for this transaction. The USDC moves straight from your wallet into NightWatch's treasury in the same on-chain transaction that records the purchase; the CherryVending contract itself never holds your funds.
5. Wait about a minute. The panel polls the purchase's status every few seconds and shows "waiting for confirmations," then "credited," once the transaction is confirmed on the test network.

A few things worth knowing before you press Buy: there's a $500-per-account daily limit, shown on the panel as "Daily limit left today." The purchase is final the moment it's confirmed, there's no way to cancel or reverse it. And never send USDC directly to the contract address outside this panel (or the other two ways described below); a transfer that isn't routed through an actual purchase can't be credited or recovered.

Two other ways to buy exist alongside the panel: a wallet can call approve() then buy() on the CherryVending contract directly, using the account reference that GET /cherries/vending/quote returns and a fresh random salt of your own (pass payer and salt to the quote to get back the purchase id you will create), without using the panel at all, and an AI agent can pay over x402 with no on-chain transaction to send itself: it signs one USDC payment authorization from a wallet holding test USDC, and NightWatch settles it (see chapter 10). All three ways credit the same $1-for-100🍒 price, the same $500-per-purchase and $500-per-day limits, and the same one-way, spend-only Cherry.

Only NightWatch's own accounts are credited right now. While vending runs on this test network, a purchase from any account outside NightWatch's own QA and demo accounts is refused or held rather than credited, since the USDC being spent is test-network money with no real-world value. Buying Cherry with real USDC, credited to any account, opens on Base's real network at public launch.

Three Cherry balances that are not the same thing

A genuinely confusing detail worth naming directly: there are three separate places you might see a number labeled "Cherry" today, and they do not share a balance:

The welcome credit itself is now unified at 10 🍒 no matter which door you came through, once per account: email, Google, wallet, Developer API, the web's "Log in with Telegram" button, and the Telegram Mini App's own claim all grant the same 10 🍒 (an agent you register gets its own account and its own welcome credit, separate from yours). What still genuinely differs is the ledger it lands in first: the Mini App's claim credits its own separate ledger rather than your main NightWatch balance directly. If that same Telegram identity later links to (or signs up on) your main NightWatch account, the pending Mini App credit moves into your main ledger instead of granting a second 10 🍒 on top of it - you still end up with one welcome credit per account, just possibly parked in the Mini App ledger until that link happens.

Promotional, purchased, and earned Cherry

Every Cherry credit is tagged as one of three kinds, and they behave differently:

When a balance is spent down, NightWatch draws promotional Cherry first, then purchased credit, then earned credit last, so your own earned balance is preserved for as long as possible. A tip or other transfer to another account works differently: it can only draw on promotional or earned credit, never purchased credit, so purchased Cherry can't be moved to someone else's balance.

Ledger discipline: append-only, one direction only

NightWatch's Cherry ledger is append-only: rows are never edited or deleted, even to fix a mistake. A correction is made by writing a new, compensating entry (a matching credit or debit that cancels the error out), never by rewriting history. This is the same no-retroactive-restatement principle NightWatch applies to its published grades and reports, applied here to money.

On-chain Cherry (the CHRY token) is always treated as a withdrawn subset of this ledger, never the other way around. Value only ever flows one direction: ledger, then a signed voucher, then an on-chain mint. The blockchain never writes back into the ledger. If the two ever disagree, the ledger is treated as correct, and the system simply stops issuing new vouchers until someone reconciles the difference; no on-chain state ever needs to be unwound. The key that signs those vouchers is required to live only on NightWatch's own server, never in any frontend code a browser could read, because whoever holds that key can authorize new Cherry up to the token's fixed 1 billion cap.

One more detail worth knowing if you run an AI agent on NightWatch: an agent does not hold Cherry in its own name. Whatever Cherry an agent earns is always credited to its human owner's linked wallet, not a wallet the agent itself controls.

Cashing out earned Cherry: two different gates, not in this version yet

Accumulating and spending earned Cherry inside NightWatch never requires a wallet or an SBT. Turning earned Cherry into real USDC is a separate matter, and it is not in this version.

USDC payouts are not in this version. A payout request can still be filed, but nothing pays out yet: nobody, task-earner or royalty-earner, can actually receive USDC out of NightWatch today, regardless of what wallet or SBT they hold. Don't read anything below as "withdrawal works today"; it doesn't, for anyone.

Once payouts are live, the two kinds of earned Cherry are designed to be treated differently. The SBT requirement will only ever apply to royalty-derived Cherry, never to task rewards. A task reward will be cashed out with nothing more than a linked wallet; spending Cherry inside the server (reads, subscriptions, task applications, gas sponsorship) never requires a wallet or SBT and still doesn't. A royalty payout is the one path designed to also require a minted SBT - that requirement is also not in this version. The previous chapter, The Knowledge Economy, walks through exactly what happens to an unclaimed royalty once that SBT gate is live, including the 30-day countdown to escheat.

Paying per read: x402, live, but in testnet mode

When a paid data read runs out of free quota, NightWatch's server can ask for payment directly over HTTP using a standard called x402: it responds with status code 402 ("Payment Required"), describing exactly how much USDC is owed, and a compatible client pays it with a single gasless, signed authorization. This is live today, but it runs in testnet mode: the network is Base Sepolia, not Base mainnet, so the USDC being asked for has no real-world value yet. Live payments on Base and Arbitrum mainnet are not in this version; planned for v1.1. Two of NightWatch's own metered routes (token intelligence and the cross-venue pair-gate check) are currently priced at $0, so there's no charge for them at all; reading a file from NightWatch's playbook knowledge library charges $0.01, and reading a Forge vault's live signal or turning one into a plan for your own account (chapter 27) each charge $0.10 (10🍒).

The order NightWatch actually checks, for any caller, is: does a registered agent still have free reads left today (up to 100 per day)? If not, does it have a Cherry balance to spend? If not, can it pay through x402? Only if none of those apply does the caller get the 402 challenge. That means holding a registered agent API key does not make you immune to ever seeing a 402; it just moves you to the front of the queue. An agent that has already used its 100 free reads for the day and holds no Cherry balance gets exactly the same 402 challenge as a completely anonymous, unregistered caller.

Cherry Store and upgrading your subscription

Once signed in, the Cherry Store lets you spend a Cherry balance on a small set of paid products: a deeper research report, a liquidity depth score, and a priority monitoring slot that scans a token once a minute instead of on the normal schedule. Prices are shown per item in Cherry on the page itself, and SBT holders get a noted discount. If your balance is at zero, the store shows a "Start mining" link into the Earn hub instead. Separately, your Account page has its own Upgrade flow for moving between subscription tiers.

The epoch-0 problem: cleaning the ledger before pegging it to real money

A direct audit of the Cherry ledger on 2026-09-10 found 10,945,749 Cherry spread across 19 accounts, and a striking anomaly inside that: 98% of it, sitting in 205 ledger rows across just 5 accounts, carries no record at all of where it came from (no source_type), consistent with old test or seed data predating today's ledger discipline. If NightWatch pegged every Cherry to $0.01 today without sorting that out first, it would be manufacturing roughly a $109,000 liability out of what looks like leftover test data. NightWatch's plan is to classify those specific balances first, either zeroing them out as test data or formally absorbing them as backdated "house vesting," and to disclose that decision publicly, before any real on-chain claim path opens up for actual users. That classification hasn't happened yet.

Mainnet: paused on purpose, not stalled by accident

Both the Cherry ERC-20 contract and the SBT contract are deployed only on Base Sepolia, a public test network; the same addresses on Base mainnet are empty. This is a deliberate decision, not a forgotten step: the team's stated position is that deploying Cherry to mainnet before there's real external demand to trade or transfer it would only add custody and regulatory exposure for no benefit, since the entire design point of Cherry is that its value is never supposed to depend on being found on an open market. Identity pieces (the SBT and a planned registration under the ERC-8004 standard) are treated separately from that pause, since they represent who you are rather than a tradeable token, but neither is live on mainnet yet either.

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What you can do now

• Sign up through whichever of the five paths fits you best; if it hands you a recovery code or an API key, save it immediately. It is shown exactly once, but it is not merely decorative: POST /auth/agent/recover (API only, no web screen yet) will re-issue your API key using your agent name plus that code.
• Link a second identity from your Account page, not by logging in fresh again; logging in a second time while already signed in is deliberately blocked to stop you from accidentally splitting into two accounts.
• Manage every agent, key, wallet, and message channel in one place: Account -> Connections, across its five groups (agents, ways your AI talks to NightWatch, wallets, messaging, trading keys). An agent you create there is owned by your account from birth, so its Cherry and history roll up to you, not a standalone identity - rename it or revoke its keys any time. "Adopt an existing agent" is not in this version; planned for v1.1.
• Grab the public knowledge vault from the same tab: the Knowledge card's Download vault (.zip) button pulls the current public commons straight from GitHub, no account or plugin required. You'll find the same card, smaller, on the Earn hub next to Playbooks.
• Buy Cherry from your Account page if you want to try it: connect a wallet, pick an amount ($1 to $500), and sign one authorization in the Buy Cherry panel; NightWatch pays the gas and credit lands in about a minute, on Base Sepolia, a public test network today. Never send USDC straight to the contract address outside the panel, approve()+buy(), or an x402 top-up.
• Treat your Cherry balance as spendable, not investable: exactly $0.01 per Cherry, always. USDC payouts are not in this version, so no earned Cherry - task reward or royalty - converts to real USDC for anyone yet, no matter what wallet or SBT you hold. When payouts arrive, a task reward will need only a linked wallet to cash out; a royalty will additionally need a minted SBT.
• Know which Cherry balance you're looking at. The Telegram Mini App, the web app, and the on-chain token are three separate balances today, not one number in three places - linking your Telegram account in Connections delivers alerts and reminders, it doesn't merge the Mini App balance into your web account.
• Spend promotional Cherry within 30 days; purchased and earned Cherry (tasks, royalties, and Cherry you bought outright) never expire.
• Don't send real money through x402 expecting it to move on Base mainnet yet. The one live paid-read endpoint asks for testnet USDC on Base Sepolia; nothing you pay there today has real-world value, and live mainnet payments are planned for v1.1. And don't assume a registered API key exempts you from ever seeing a 402: it only grants a 100-reads-per-day head start.
• If you're a contributor owed a royalty, know that right now nobody can withdraw USDC at all - payouts are not in this version for anyone, not just for royalties. When payouts arrive, cashing out a royalty specifically (not a task reward) will additionally require a minted SBT.