Markets, Assets & Decimals
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Trading on Native Core is organized around assets and markets. Understanding how they are identified and how their numbers are scaled is essential for reading the order book and placing orders correctly.
An asset is a token tracked on Native Core, identified by a numeric asset_id and a unique symbol.
balance_decimals — the internal scale used for balances and settlement of that asset.
issuer — the owner account bound to an asset (via the operator listing action). It is a record-keeping binding only and confers no admin privileges; genesis and legacy-listed assets show the zero address.
A market is a tradable pair, identified by a numeric market_id, with a base asset and a quote asset. Each market carries its own scaling metadata:
base_quantity_decimals — lot scale for order quantity in the base asset.
price_decimals — decimal places for price (quote units per 1 base unit).
max_price_sig_figs — maximum significant figures allowed for non-integer display prices.
quote_balance_decimals — the quote asset's balance_decimals, included so clients can convert quote notional without a separate lookup.
Only allowlisted quote assets may be used as the quote side of a market. Each carries a minimum order notional (min_quantity) so dust orders are rejected. For example, the genesis allowlist uses USDC and USDT with a 10 minimum, ETH with 0.01, and BNB with 0.02. Orders below the configured minimum are rejected with MinTradeSpotNtl.
Native Core executes on integers only. Public APIs accept and return human-readable decimal strings, while the signed transaction payload carries raw integer atoms:
raw_quantity = display_quantity * 10^base_quantity_decimals
raw_price = display_price * 10^price_decimalsSubmitting more fractional digits than a market's price_decimals or base_quantity_decimals allows is rejected (invalid_price_precision / invalid_quantity_precision). For the full conversion rules and worked examples, see the Decimal Units reference.
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