Account Operations | Centrifuge

getBalance

Reads free, reserved, and frozen balance plus the account nonce from the chain's System.Account storage map, decoded directly from the SCALE-encoded response — no indexer or third-party API involved.

Field	Type	Required	Description
`network`	select	✓ Yes	`centrifuge` \| `altair` \| `development`. No default — see Networks.
`address`	text	✓ Yes	SS58 address to query. Must be encoded with the SS58 prefix matching `network`.

Example response:

{
  "address": "4d3...",
  "freeBalance": "5000000000000000000",
  "reservedBalance": "0",
  "frozenBalance": "0",
  "nonce": 3,
  "status": "success"
}

Response Field	Meaning
`freeBalance`	Transferable balance, in base units (Planck) as a decimal string.
`reservedBalance`	Reserved (non-transferable) balance, in base units.
`frozenBalance`	Frozen balance, in base units.
`nonce`	Account nonce — useful for diagnosing a stuck extrinsic once write operations ship.

All amounts are base-unit strings. freeBalance and friends come back as Planck (base-unit) decimal strings, not human CFG/AIR amounts — pass them through utility.convertUnits with the network's native decimals (18 for both CFG and AIR) to get a display value.

Validation and Error Behavior

Situation	Error Code
`network` missing	`CFG_MISSING_NETWORK`
`address` missing	`CFG_MISSING_ADDRESS`
`network` not a recognized key	`CFG_INVALID_NETWORK`
`address` fails SS58 checksum	`VAL_INVALID_SS58_ADDRESS`
`address`'s embedded SS58 prefix doesn't match `network`'s prefix	`VAL_NETWORK_MISMATCH`

Never-funded accounts aren't an error. If System.Account storage is empty for the address (it has never received a transfer), the node returns a successful result with all three balances at "0" and nonce: 0 — a zero balance is normal chain state, not a failure.

Address/network mismatch is a hard guard, not a warning. The same 32-byte public key is a valid address on every SS58 network — only the prefix differs. Rather than silently reading storage under a reinterpreted prefix, a prefix mismatch between address and network fails outright with VAL_NETWORK_MISMATCH. Use utility.convertAddress to re-encode an address for the network you actually intend to query.

account.transfer — Not Available

A native transfer operation (balances.transfer_keep_alive) is designed at the Services layer, but it is not wired into this node's routing and always returns CHAIN_SIGNING_NOT_AVAILABLE when invoked directly against the service — there is no production-grade .NET Substrate client capable of sr25519 signing today. See Roadmap.