Unknown is not zero

A missing number and a number that is zero mean opposite things. A token with no listings has no floor. A token that traded nothing yesterday has a volume of zero. Showing both as 0 turns a gap in the data into a claim about the market.

StampDEX keeps them apart everywhere.

How to read it on screen

You see	It means
A double dash	No source answered. A screen reader announces it as Unknown
0	A source answered, and the answer was zero

How to read it in the API

Every market row carries a sources object with one entry per figure:

{
  "tick": "MSKK",
  "floor_price": 1,
  "holders": 19090,
  "mint_progress": 100,
  "sources": {
    "identity": "stampchain",
    "price": "stampchain",
    "volume": "stampchain",
    "holders": "stampchain",
    "listings": "none"
  }
}

A field whose source reads none is unknown. A numeric field with no reading is null or absent, never 0.

The source map wins over the number. A nested block can carry a literal zero while the source map says none. When that happens the field is unknown, and rendering the zero would be wrong.

Why the rule is written down

This is not a style preference. It came from a measured failure. On one reading of the first hundred tokens on the board, the volume source read none for ninety-seven rows and the volume field was null for the same ninety-seven, while a nested market block held a literal 0 for every one of them. A fallback chain that treated the missing value as zero was printing a confident zero for ninety-seven tokens that had simply not been measured.

The fix was to derive an explicit known flag for each figure from the source map, and to render on that rather than on the number. The behaviour is covered by tests, so it cannot quietly regress.

Where the rule applies

• Fully: the market board, token pages, search results, collection figures, and the API responses behind all of them.
• Partially: parts of the portfolio are still being brought up to it. When a price is missing there, treat the holding’s value as unknown rather than as zero.

Sorting and filtering follow the same rule. An unknown price does not sort as though it were zero, and a price range filter does not return it as a match.

The neighbouring distinction

The same discipline applies to two words that are easy to confuse:

• Unknown: nobody has an answer.
• Unavailable: we could not ask.

They appear together in deployment resolution, where “no deployment exists” and “the index did not answer” are different screens. See Deployment identity.

Related

• Market data
• Data provenance