Three years ago I had a wallet drained through an approval I had granted to a contract six months earlier and then forgotten entirely, with every individual transaction in that wallet signed correctly and the funds gone regardless.
Genius Terminal's signatureless execution keeps the user in full custody of their keys while removing per-transaction signing from the execution flow. Permissions are set at the account level during setup and trades execute within that defined scope without requiring re-authorization on each action. The closest parallel I have found is a hotel key card. You do not re-verify your identity at the door every time you enter your room. You present credentials once at check-in, the authorization scope is set for the duration of your stay, and the card opens exactly the door it is supposed to open. The hotel knows which room is yours. The key has not changed. Only the re-verification step has been removed.
The assumption most experienced crypto users carry is that signing each transaction is what protects their custody, when the more precise framing is that these have always been two separate operations the industry attached together so consistently that removing one now feels like removing the other. Self-custody means the private key controlling the wallet is held by the user and not the platform. Signing each transaction is a confirmation pattern built on top of that custody, not the custody itself. The seed phrase holds the position. The signature has always been the receipt.
The measure I use is straightforward: the ability to recover funds without the platform's cooperation confirms that custody is intact regardless of how many individual transactions required explicit signing along the way, and the absence of that ability means the signing ritual was performing a security function it was never actually providing, making the custody conditional in a way no confirmation popup was ever going to fix.