Order lifecycle

An order is not a request that either succeeds or fails. It is a state machine, and every state has a name the product shows you, a meaning, and a place where the money is. This page draws the machine.

Colour says where the BTC is, and nothing else. Purple is the per-listing escrow StampDEX controls. Failed is purple for the same reason Settling is: the money is in the same place. Failed is not a state where funds vanish, it is a state where they stop moving.

Every state

State	What happened	Who can act
Draft	The listing is prepared but the seller has not signed it. Buyers never see it	The seller, by signing
Open	The listing is live on the book at its exact amount and price	Any buyer, or the seller by cancelling
Pending	A buyer locked the listing and is paying. The lock releases by itself if the buyer stops	That one buyer
Awaiting transfer	The payment is broadcast. StampDEX waits for confirmation and an index check	Nobody. Bitcoin decides
Settling	The settlement worker is verifying the balance and broadcasting the token transfer	Nobody
Awaiting confirmation	The token transfer is broadcast and needs one confirmation	Nobody
Filled	Settled. Buyer has the tokens, seller has the proceeds	Nobody. It is done
Cancelled	The seller cancelled before a sale	Nobody
Expired	The listing, or a buyer’s lock, ran out of time	Nobody
Failed	The payment confirmed but the token balance could not be verified. Funds are held in escrow	An operator

The transitions that surprise people

Pending goes back to Open. A buyer who locks a listing and then walks away does not freeze it. The lock lapses and the listing returns to the book. Neither side lost anything, and the seller does nothing.

Open does not become Open at a new price. There is no price edit. Changing a price means Cancelled plus a new Draft, both signed by you. The registry records this explicitly for both protocols: listings must be cancelled and relisted, because no atomic listing update is implemented. See Change a listing price.

Failed is not the end of the money. It is the machine refusing to release funds against a balance it could not verify. See Recovery.

Reading an order over the API

curl "https://stamp.api.bitcoinuniverse.io/api/v1/orders?tick=SEX&status=open"

Every order carries its status, and priceSatsPerToken * amount always equals totalPriceSats. The API refuses to serve a listing whose stored numbers disagree, so a listing you can read is a listing whose arithmetic holds. See Orders endpoints.

Related

• Where your funds are
• Settlement lifecycle
• Order states reference