How a market works
Every Core market has the same anatomy: a family picker, the period the figures cover, a searchable table, and an activity feed. What differs beneath that is who owns the order book and how far Core’s own responsibility extends.
Three kinds of market
Section titled “Three kinds of market”| Kind | Registry mode | Who owns the book | Protocols |
|---|---|---|---|
| Core executes | in-app-execution | Core, in a durable order journal | 11, including Ordinals, the four Atomicals markets, TAP, DMT, UNAT, Bitmap, Names |
| Core routes | external-execution | An external marketplace or provider | 8, including BRC-20 (UniSat), Stamps and SRC-20 (StampDEX), the three Dogecoin protocols, DROPS, OP_DROP |
| Core reads only | read-only, live-read-only, trade-preview-only, psbt-routing-only | Nobody deployed | 10, including Runes, Alkanes, Mezcal, OP-20, Rare Sats, CAT-20, Ordex |
Knowing which kind you are in tells you what a failure means. In a Core-executed market, an order that disappears is reconciled by Core’s own journal. In a routed market, order freshness and inventory reconciliation are delegated, and the registry says so per protocol.
The service fee
Section titled “The service fee”Core applies the same calculation across supported settlement paths:
1.5% of the gross sale price, charged independently to the buyer and to the seller.
Amounts are calculated in integer satoshis with deterministic half-up rounding and are displayed for review before signing. There is no protocol-specific minimum, though Bitcoin outputs must still satisfy the network and script dust rules needed to construct a valid settlement.
Ordex prices its own fee and a creator royalty separately, both shown in the purchase review.
Four states that look similar and are not
Section titled “Four states that look similar and are not”| State | Meaning | Retry? |
|---|---|---|
| Nothing listed | The reader answered and the market is genuinely empty. A fact about the market. | No. Retrying will not change the answer |
| Market unavailable | The reader did not answer. The number of listings is unknown, and it is never shown as zero. | Yes |
| Partial book | Only some listings could be loaded. What you see is real but incomplete. | Yes, for the rest |
| Retired | Listings and history stay viewable; buying and listing are closed permanently. A notice says so and the controls read as closed. | No. Retrying does not reopen it, and pressing a closed control creates no transaction |
OP-20 and OP Names are retired today: their legacy mutation path fails closed and the backend answers with HTTP 410.
Ordex adds two more: switched off by an operator, where the market and the orders desk stay in place and say so, and degraded, where Ordex is running but a Bitcoin Core or ordinals reader is unavailable, so existing orders stay listed and new listings cannot be verified.
A failed read is always reported in plain language. You should never see a status code or a raw response payload on a market page; if you do, report it.
Unmeasured figures
Section titled “Unmeasured figures”A figure Core cannot currently measure is shown as a dash, never as a number. Floor, volume, holder counts, listing counts, and any score derived from them all follow this rule.
Core never fills a gap with a sample row or a figure written into the application. A market can legitimately show a name and a dash in every column. Do not read a ranking into a table whose sorted column is entirely dashes.
Why an action may be unavailable
Section titled “Why an action may be unavailable”A marketplace action stays blocked unless every required gate agrees. Depending on the asset that includes the feature gate, indexer readiness, a fresh chain checkpoint, a complete asset inventory, a wallet and network match, clean funding proof, and protocol-specific settlement evidence.
An unavailable action is a safety decision. It is not proof that an asset or a market does not exist.
Browse and asset-detail pages do not show controls for mutations the protocol does not support. Where the protocol supports the action but its live authority is not ready, the control is disabled and the current reason is shown below it. Refreshing, or opening another protocol, checks that exact route again: an earlier ready result is never reused for a new action.
Market navigation
Section titled “Market navigation”The primary market navigation is deliberately limited to Ordinals, Runes,
Alkanes, Stamps, Atomicals, and More markets. Opening /trade selects the
Bitmap market. Historical Native Runes links resolve to the authoritative Runes
market.