The three pieces
There are only three things to understand.
Sessions
A set of permissions you create for an AI. Each session has a name and a credential — a secret key you paste into your AI so it can talk to Waypoint. A session starts with no power at all: it can’t see your funds, and it can’t spend them.
Budgets
What gives a session power. A budget says: this session may spend up to this much, at this venue, until this date. You sign it once. Your funds stay in your wallet; each call pulls exactly what it spends into the executor for one atomic transaction, and whatever comes back is pinned to your wallet — without ever exposing your private key to Waypoint or your model. If your model never acts, nothing ever moves.
Waypoints
A controlled point of contact that makes a DeFi protocol accessible to your model — the Uniswap waypoint, for example, is what makes Uniswap callable. Every waypoint is verified before it is published to the Directory. Your model can only use the waypoints you granted, within the limits you set. Everything else doesn’t exist as far as it’s concerned.