Asset Class
An Asset Class groups instrument templates by economic category for catalog navigation and exposure reporting.
The class groups templates by economic category. Each template specifies a product and its compliance configuration.
An Asset Class describes economic shape. It does not define token behaviour or a regulatory regime.
Each Instrument TemplateAn Instrument Template lets an issuer configure a new instrument from an approved shape, instead of re-deciding what it records, does, and permits each time.Read the concept belongs to one class, and issued instruments read that class through the template.
Seven classes ship with the platform. You can add your own and hide any class you do not use.
Delete is not blocked while templates still use a class. Hide instead, or move the templates first.
The class names exposure, the template configures the product
An Asset Class answers one question about an instrument: what kind of economic exposure it represents. The Instrument Template beneath it answers a different one: how one product is configured. The platform keeps the two apart so a configuration choice on one product can never silently redefine the taxonomy an institution reports against.
That separation is what keeps a growing catalog legible. Debt product templates can sit in a fixed-income class while carrying different dates, cash-flow features and compliance frameworks. A new product joins an existing class instead of forcing a new category, and exposure reports keep comparing like with like as the catalog grows.
The class label follows issued assets into portfolio breakdowns and catalog navigation. A report can move from a class-level view to the templates and instruments beneath it without losing the common grouping, which is what makes exposure comparable across products that share nothing else.
Seven classes ship, and a custom one is a commitment
Seven Asset Classes ship with the platform and are visible to every organization: Fixed income, Cash, Real Assets, Equity, Funds, Structured, and Digital assets. They cover the economic categories the shipped instrument templates are built around, so most deployments never add one.
Add a custom class when the shipped categories do not meet your reporting needs. Review its name and scope before assigning templates: the class label appears in portfolio views for their issued instruments.
An administrator, system manager, or asset designer adds, edits, hides, or deletes a class; other roles read the catalog only. The Asset classes screen covers the full workflow: where the screen lives and which badge marks a System row against a Custom one. It also covers why Hide sits next to every row while Edit and Delete appear only on the rows you created.
Hide first, delete last
Retiring an Asset Class safely means choosing between three controls that look interchangeable and are not. The three, Hide, Rename and Delete, differ in how far they reach through templates and issued instruments, and in whether you can take them back. Hide touches nothing and reverses in one click; Delete reaches everything beneath the class.
| What you do | What it reaches | Reversible |
|---|---|---|
| Hide | Removes the class from the pickers your people choose from, for your organization only. Templates keep their class and issued instruments keep reporting it. Another organization still sees a system class you hid. | Yes. Turn on Show hidden and choose Make visible. |
| Rename | Custom classes only, gated the same as Edit. Changes the displayed name everywhere at once, including on instruments issued months ago, because the name is read live rather than copied onto the asset. The slug is rebuilt from the new name, and the class's templates move to it in the same save; anything outside the platform that grouped on the old slug stops matching. | Renaming back restores the name and slug, and the templates follow it again. Copies taken in between, such as an exported report, keep whatever was live when they were written. |
| Delete | Custom classes only. Deletion is allowed while templates still reference the class. Those templates lose the class: a holding lookup for their instruments finds no class, while portfolio and asset stats breakdowns keep bucketing them under the stale slug the template stored rather than dropping them. | No. The confirmation says so, and it does not mention the templates. |
Hide is the answer almost every time. It takes a class out of circulation without touching a single template or a single issued instrument, it is scoped to your organization, and it is one click away from being undone. It also works on the seven shipped classes, which delete does not.
Delete is the one whose reach runs wider than the row you are looking at.
Hide reverses in a click. Delete does not, once templates already point at the class.
If you do need a class gone rather than hidden, move first: point every template that uses it at another class, then delete. The delete confirmation does not list the templates that still use the class, and neither does the Asset classes screen. The instrument template list in the Console filters by class, and that filter matches each template's stored copy of the class slug, which a rename of the class keeps current. Filter by the class before you delete to find every template you still need to move.
Where the boundary lives
An Asset Class is an off-chain catalog record: an identifier, a name, a description, a slug, an owner and a system flag. The catalog record itself lives off chain. An Instrument Template stores the class identifier plus a copy of the slug, taken when the template was created or last reclassified and refreshed whenever the class is renamed. An asset classification claim records the slug on the token's identity contract when the claim is issued. A later class rename or deletion does not update that claim or an exported report, and a deletion leaves the template's stored slug as it was.
The classification is single-valued and it lives on the template: one template belongs to one Asset Class, and an issued asset takes its class from the template it was created from rather than storing its own. The identifier preserves the relationship; the slug supports filtering, navigation and reporting. That is what makes a rename reach backwards through the catalog and a delete reach with it.
Hiding writes a record on your side of the boundary. The shared definition, and what everyone else sees, never moves.
Visibility is organization-scoped, and hiding is recorded separately from the class itself. System definitions have no organization owner and are visible by default. Hiding one writes a record against your organization rather than changing the shared definition, which is why your choice never reaches another organization. Custom definitions carry the organization's identifier, and the API resolves only classes that are shared or owned by the requesting organization.
Compliance is deliberately separate. A template can also reference one Compliance Template, which defines the checks and modules applied when an asset is created. This prevents a regulatory regime from displacing the economic class. Reporting can aggregate instruments by class while compliance evidence follows the actual rules selected for the template and issued asset.
What the API exposes
Integrations manage Asset Classes through the platform-settings endpoints in the version 2 API, which list, read, create, update and delete definitions. List responses support pagination, sorting, search, facets and a visibility filter. Reads return the shared system classes plus the classes the calling organization owns, and nothing owned by anyone else.
Two things decide whether your integration survives a rename.
Key on the identifier, never on the slug. The slug is the grouping key current navigation and reporting paths use, and it is rebuilt from the name whenever the Console saves a class, so it moves when a name moves. The identifier does not.
Do not treat a slug as globally unique. Uniqueness is enforced per owner: the shared system classes are unique among themselves, and your organization's classes are unique within your organization. Those are two separate sets, so your organization can hold a custom class whose slug matches a shipped one. A create or rename request that collides inside its own set is refused with DALP-0480, which reports that an asset class with this name or slug already exists in this organization.
Create and update requests carry the class name, description and slug. If a create request omits the slug, the platform derives one from the name in kebab-case. A rename onto a reserved class slug is refused before anything is saved when a template linked to the class has a base asset type that slug does not allow. The service rejects an Instrument Template whose class identifier is neither a shared system class nor a class owned by the caller's organization.
Read the Instrument Template's compliance-template link and configuration to assess compliance. The class slug describes economic classification.
Classification is not a control
An Asset Class supports compliance work by making populations easier to define and review, but it does not enforce investor or transfer rules. The class answers which economic group an instrument belongs to. The linked Compliance Template answers which controls apply when an asset is created.
This separation lets compliance teams compare instruments by economic exposure without assuming that all products in a class share one regulatory treatment. Two templates in the same class can select different compliance frameworks. One compliance framework can be used across economic classes when its rules fit.
For audit and reporting, use the class as a grouping dimension and the actual template and issued-asset configuration as control evidence. A report can show exposure by class, then identify the compliance framework attached to each product. The class label alone cannot prove that a transfer check ran, what it blocked or what evidence it left.
One consequence follows from the class being read live rather than copied. A portfolio breakdown you exported last quarter can disagree with the same breakdown run today because someone renamed a class in between, with no change to a single instrument. Where a report has to be reproducible, store the class identifier alongside the label you printed.
Frequently asked questions
Can I change the class an instrument belongs to after it is issued?
Not one instrument at a time. Classification lives on the template, so reclassifying the template moves every instrument issued from it in the same moment, and there is no per-instrument override: a holding's class resolves through its template alone. The template also stores a fresh copy of the class slug when it is reclassified, so its stored grouping key follows the move.
If I delete a class and recreate it with the same name, do the links come back?
No. A new class receives a new identifier even when its name and slug match the deleted one, so the platform treats the two as unrelated. Re-point each affected template at the new class to restore the grouping; instruments issued from those templates then report it again through the template.
Why does an externally registered token show no asset class?
It never came from an Instrument Template, so there is no template link for the class to resolve through. The indexer joins a token to its template and then to the template's class, both as left joins, so a token issued outside the platform's template flow returns no match at either step, and no class.
Is the asset class recorded on chain?
The catalog record is not; the class lives in the platform's off-chain tables, and reporting resolves it live from there. One on-chain trace does exist: issuing an asset classification claim writes the class slug onto the token's identity contract as a snapshot taken at that moment, one a later rename or delete cannot update. Adding, renaming, hiding or deleting a class itself needs no transaction and touches no contract. On-chain enforcement, who may hold an asset and what may transfer, comes from the compliance configuration, never from the class.
Instrument Templates
An Instrument Template lets an issuer configure a new instrument from an approved shape, instead of re-deciding what it records, does, and permits each time.
Denomination Asset
A Denomination Asset lets a payout-bearing Token Feature, such as Maturity Redemption or a yield schedule, pay holders in a real asset it never custodies.