Authentication

Your software will have to authenticate itself when:

  1. You onboard your wallet using automatic onboarding code
  2. You generate JWT (see below) for a private Rest API call or subscription to a private WebSocket
  3. You send order to Paradex

What is JWT

Paradex uses JSON Web Tokens (JWTs) to authenticate users.

JWTs are a secure way to transmit information between parties as they are signed by the sender, which allows the recipient to verify the authenticity of the message.

For security reasons JWTs used in Paradex’s authentication mechanism expire every 5 minutes. It is not possible to extend the expiration.

This means that users will need to re-authenticate regularly in order to always have a fresh JWT readily available.

Paradex recommends refreshing JWT well before expiry (e.g., after 3 minutes) to allow multiple retry attempts while still having a valid JWT.

This will help you to avoid interruptions in making REST API calls.

When using WebSocket connections, after the initial authentication, users do not need to re-authenticate again for the lifetime of the connection.

See more regarding Paradex JWT mechanism.

Benefits of using JWT

The benefits of using JWT for authentication:

  • Security: JWTs are signed by the issuer, which allows the recipient to verify the authenticity of the message.
  • Efficiency: JWTs are small and lightweight, which makes them efficient to transmit over the network.