Account admin · BALANCE
Available vs Total Balance: Where the Missing Part Usually Sits
The account page says a little over a thousand. You open the spot order form and the small print above the input says three hundred available. Two thoughts usually follow: something was deducted, or someone got in.
Almost always neither. The same money is simply being counted in two different states — the total answers "how much do you hold", the available figure answers "how much can you move this second", and the gap between them always has somewhere it went. This piece separates the three numbers that all look like a balance, lists the seven places the difference normally sits, and finishes with three cases where nothing left your account at all. The logic holds on any centralised exchange; the Gate-specific part comes at the end.
Three numbers that all look like a balance
At least three figures on the assets page read like "your balance", but they answer different questions. Mixing up any two produces a specific kind of confusion.
| Figure | What it answers | When it moves |
|---|---|---|
| Total valuation | What everything you hold is worth right now, converted into one unit | Every time the market moves, even if you do nothing |
| Balance of one coin | How many units of that coin you hold | Only on a real trade, deposit, withdrawal or settlement |
| Available for one coin | How many of those units you can commit right now | When you place orders, subscribe, transfer or release them |
The relationship is plain: balance = available + held. Total valuation then converts every coin balance — held portions included — at the current price. So "total one thousand, available three hundred" is a perfectly ordinary state with seven hundred sitting in holds and nothing lost.
The seven places the difference sits
A hold is not a black box. Each one is created by a specific action and released by a specific action.
| Where it went | What put it there | How to release it |
|---|---|---|
| Unfilled resting orders | A limit buy holds the quote currency; a limit sell holds the coin being sold | Cancel it, or let it fill |
| A withdrawal in progress | Submitted, still being processed or waiting to be broadcast | Wait; some can be cancelled before broadcast |
| An earn subscription | Coins moved into a flexible or fixed-term product | Flexible usually redeems on demand; fixed waits for maturity or early-redemption rules |
| Loan collateral | One coin pledged to borrow another | Repay, and the collateral is released |
| A C2C ad or open order | A sell advert posted, or an order still running | Take the ad down, or let the order complete |
| Another sub-wallet | Spot, futures, earn and funding wallets are accounted separately | Transfer it back to the wallet you want to trade from |
| Pending credit or settlement | Deposit short of confirmations, reward not yet distributed, interest not yet settled | Only time; the chain or the product rules decide |
The first two account for most of the questions people ask. Resting orders especially: one limit buy you placed weeks ago and forgot will quietly hold that quote currency indefinitely, and it is usually on the second page of the order list where nobody scrolls.
A one-minute lookup, working backwards
You do not have to check all seven. Think back to what you did last before the number looked wrong, and this order usually lands on the first try:
- Placed a limit order and left it → open your active orders and read every one still resting.
- Tapped anything labelled earn, subscribe or auto-invest → check earn positions; flexible products are often pre-ticked.
- Made a withdrawal → check withdrawal history; anything still processing is your gap.
- Switched account tabs on the trading page → you probably moved funds to another wallet; go back to the asset overview and read the per-wallet split.
- Cannot remember anything → stop guessing and export the account ledger, then read backwards from the top until you hit the first entry you do not recognise. How to pull it: exporting trade history.
The order matters. Check the holds you created first, then platform-side processing, and only then suspect the exchange. People who do it the other way round tend to open a ticket, then find the forgotten order while waiting for a reply.
Three gaps where nothing is missing
Three more cases involve no hold at all. They are display effects, and they deserve their own heading because people burn a lot of time on them.
One: the unit of account changed. Valued in a stablecoin, your total falls when your holdings fall. Switch the display to value in bitcoin and the same pile shows a different number again. Nothing left; the ruler changed. To see whether coins actually left, read the quantities, not the conversion.
Two: the interface is rounding. List views show a fixed number of decimals so the columns line up, and the tail is simply cut off. A balance worth a few cents displays as zero, and the sum of the list disagrees with the detail page by a rounding crumb. That is also why dust seems to vanish from the list — and dust has other problems of its own, covered in why dust balances will not sell or withdraw.
Three: you are looking at different scopes. One page totals the spot wallet, another totals every account. You note a figure on screen A, see a different one on screen B, and both are right. Confirm the filter matches before you compare.
Why your portfolio tracker disagrees too
If you also run a portfolio app, expect a third number that matches neither. Trackers usually report cost basis and profit, while the exchange reports current valuation — they are answering different questions on purpose. Three practical causes of the gap:
- Held amounts may be excluded. Some trackers read only the spendable figure through the API, so anything in earn products or collateral silently disappears from their total.
- Price sources differ. The tracker may take a global index price while the exchange values your assets on its own market, and thin pairs can diverge noticeably.
- Transfers get read as trades. Move coins between your own wallets and a naive importer can log a disposal followed by an acquisition, inflating both volume and apparent profit.
None of these mean money is missing. They do mean you should never reconcile an exchange balance against a tracker total — reconcile it against the exchange's own ledger export.
Where to start looking on Gate
Gate's help centre article on viewing wallet assets and transferring funds on the web gives the entry point: after logging in, go to Assets → Fund Management → Fund Overview. That page lists every wallet's holdings in one place, which makes it the right first stop for item six above.
- Switch wallets from the left sidebar on desktop, or the wallet names at the bottom on mobile, to see what each one is holding.
- Move funds back with the Transfer control on the same page: pick source wallet, destination wallet, coin and amount, then confirm.
- Hide the amounts with the eye icon — useful when you open the account somewhere public.
Inside a wallet, the per-coin view normally states why an amount is held; to trace it entry by entry you still need the ledger export. Interfaces get redesigned and menu names change, so treat what is on your screen as authoritative. We checked this path against Gate's published help documentation on 2026-09-03 and deliberately copied no amounts, limits or durations.
Three things not to do
- Do not top up because the available figure looks short. This is the expensive reaction. The money is usually sitting in your own unfilled order; cancelling returns it. Depositing more turns an accounting question into a larger position and an extra fee.
- Do not break a fixed-term earn product to free up balance. Early redemption typically forfeits accrued yield and can carry its own conditions. Giving up a yield stream to save one trading fee usually nets out badly — read the redemption terms before you touch it.
- Do not file a ticket over a falling valuation. Support sees the same number you do. Rule out the unit-of-account and rounding effects above, confirm that a specific coin's quantity really dropped with no matching ledger entry, and only then write in — you will have far better information by that point.
Editorial check
What our editors checked
Two things stand out after going through the official documentation. First, order of investigation: holds you created (orders, earn, transfers), then platform-side processing (withdrawals, settlement), and only then the exchange itself. Most people stop at step one. Second, copy no figures: valuations follow the market, holds follow your own actions, and limits and durations follow product changes, so any specific number in a third-party article — this one included — may already be stale. To reconcile line by line, continue with exporting trade history; if the gap is down to a few cents, you are looking at a dust balance instead.