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Getting Started

Who this page is for

This page is for traders who want to make their first trade on Canonic through the live app at canonic.trade.

If you are integrating programmatically, skip to DEX Aggregators. If you want to provide liquidity algorithmically, use Market Makers.

Before you trade

You should understand three things up front:

  • Canonic is a spot exchange, not a perpetuals venue.
  • Canonic uses a Midpoint Anchored Order Book (MAOB), so liquidity rests on discrete rungs around an oracle midpoint.
  • Your trade can revert if liquidity, slippage guards, deadlines, or oracle validity checks are not satisfied.

Read these pages first if the model is new to you:

First-trade checklist

  1. Choose the market you want to trade.
  2. Confirm the market exists in Contract Deployments.
  3. Fund your wallet with the token you intend to spend plus gas for the network.
  4. Open the live trading interface at canonic.trade/trade.
  5. Connect your wallet and select the correct network and market.
  6. Decide whether your trade is better expressed as an exact-out or target-in order.
  7. Review the displayed taker fee and your slippage guardrails before submitting.

Picking the right order type

Use target-in when you want to cap how much you spend and accept a partial fill if your minimum received amount is still met.

Use exact-out when you need a specific amount out and want the whole transaction to revert unless that target is satisfied within your guardrails.

In practice:

  • Buying a token with a fixed quote budget usually maps to target-in.
  • Selling into a fixed spend cap or receiving a fixed minimum often maps to exact-out.

See Order Types for the core behavior, and Takers for the exact contract entrypoints.

Guardrails to set carefully

Your trade parameters matter as much as the market selection:

  • Slippage guard: use maxQuoteIn, maxBaseIn, minBaseOut, or minQuoteOut depending on the taker function.
  • Deadline: use a short deadline so stale quotes cannot execute much later.
  • Traversal limit: if you integrate at the contract level, maxRung limits how far from midpoint you are willing to cross.

If you are trading through a UI, confirm the UI is setting these consistently with your intent.

After your first trade

After execution, review:

  • the actual amount spent / received
  • the fee paid
  • whether your trade crossed more depth than expected

If you want to understand what happened at the contract level, see:

Common mistakes

  • Trading without understanding the difference between exact-out and target-in.
  • Using loose slippage limits in thin markets.
  • Forgetting that Canonic is spot only.
  • Reusing the same address for maker and taker activity without accounting for self-trade prevention limits.

Next steps

Previous
Core Contributors
Next
MAOB Overview