Liquid Assets

Liquid supports two categories of assets: the native LBTC and issued assets. Understanding the asset model is essential for any exchange integration, because your wallet infrastructure handles all of them the same way.

LBTC

LBTC is Liquid's native currency. It's pegged 1:1 to Bitcoin and is used to pay transaction fees on the network.

Asset ID (mainnet): 6f0279e9ed041c3d710a9f57d0c02928416460c4b722ae3457a11eec381c526d
Precision: 8 (same as Bitcoin, so 1 LBTC = 100,000,000 Lsatoshis)

Every wallet on Liquid needs some LBTC to pay fees, even if it primarily holds other assets. Fees are typically very small (a few satoshis).

Asset Issuance

Anyone can create a new asset on Liquid. Once issued, the asset lives natively on the network; it's not a smart contract or a token standard. It's a first class citizen of every Liquid transaction.

Common issued assets

Asset	Ticker	Type	Precision
Tether USD	USDt	Stablecoin	8
Various securities		Tokenized securities (via AMP2)	Varies

See the Liquid Asset Registry for the full list of registered assets.

Asset identification

Every asset is identified by its asset ID, a 64 character hex string. This is deterministically derived from the issuance transaction and never changes.

# Example asset ID
ce091c998b83c78bb71a632313ba3760f1763d9cfcffae02258ffa9865a37bd2

Your backend should store and reference assets by their full asset ID. Tickers and names come from the registry and can be ambiguous (multiple assets could share a ticker).

Precision

Precision determines how to convert between the on chain satoshi representation and display units.

Precision	Satoshis per display unit	Example
0	1	1 sat = 1 unit
2	100	100 sat = 1.00 (like USD cents)
8	100,000,000	100M sat = 1.00000000 (like BTC)

When your API returns a balance of 50000 satoshis for an asset with precision 2, display it as 500.00.

Reissuance tokens

When an asset is first issued, the creator can optionally generate a reissuance token. Holding this token lets you mint additional supply of the asset later. It's a separate asset ID that acts as a key to the mint.

If you're just listing and trading assets on your exchange, you don't need to worry about reissuance tokens. They matter for issuers, not for custodians or trading platforms.

The Liquid Asset Registry

The Liquid Asset Registry is a public directory where issuers register their assets with metadata:

Name and ticker
Domain (verified via DNS)
Precision
Icon
Contract hash (links to the on chain issuance)

The registry helps your UI show "USDt" instead of a raw hex string. Query the registry to map asset IDs to human readable information.

📘
Coming soon
Detailed documentation on the Liquid Asset Registry API and Liquid Asset Price API will be added in a future update.

Plain Liquid assets vs. AMP2 managed assets

There's an important distinction:

Plain Liquid assets are unrestricted. Anyone with the asset can send it to anyone else. LBTC and USDt on Liquid are plain assets. Your exchange handles these like any other crypto: deposits, withdrawals, trading.

AMP2 managed assets have issuer enforced restrictions. The issuer controls who can hold the asset, who can transfer it, and under what conditions. These assets use a 2-of-2 multisig scheme: the user holds one key and AMP2 holds the other. Every transfer requires the issuer's co-signature.

Examples of AMP2 managed assets include tokenized securities, regulated stablecoins, and any asset where the issuer needs transfer controls for compliance.

If you only want to support LBTC and USDt, you can skip the AMP2 section entirely. If you want to support regulated/restricted assets, see Supporting AMP2 Assets.

Next steps

LWK Overview: start integrating with the Liquid Wallet Kit