> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.tetlith.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Entities & accounts

> How customers, accounts, addresses and chains relate

## Entities

An **entity** is one customer — a person or a business. It carries your
own `externalId` (so you never have to store KeyPair's id as the source
of truth) and a status: `active`, `frozen`, or `closed`.

An entity holds no balance itself — it's the record a customer's
accounts hang off.

## Accounts

An **account** is one entity's balance in one asset — `USDC_TRON` and
`USDC_ETH` are two different accounts, even though both are "USDC" to
you. This is deliberate: a customer's Tron balance and Ethereum balance
never move together, because they never touch the same chain.

Open an account explicitly before a customer can hold that asset, or
implicitly the first time you issue them a deposit address for it.

## Addresses

A deposit address is issued **per account**, or **per payment** for a
one-time-use address that ties a specific deposit to a specific order —
useful when several customers might otherwise pay into the same shared
address and you need to attribute each one.

> [!NOTE]
>
> Addresses are cheap to issue and never expire on their own. Issuing a
> new one for a customer does not invalidate the old one — funds sent to
> either still land in the same account.

## Transactions

A transaction moves a signed amount between two accounts — the sum
across every leg is always zero, per currency. There is no such thing as
a transaction that only credits or only debits: money that appears from
nowhere is exactly what the ledger exists to make impossible.

Deposits and withdrawals are transactions too, just with one leg on a
system account that represents the chain itself.


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