Concepts
Unit multipliers
Why some assets report a raw quantity that has to be scaled before it matches a displayed price.
Some on-chain assets don't report price directly — they report a raw quantity in native units, which must be scaled by a multiplier before it lines up with a human-readable, displayed price. That multiplier can change block to block as the underlying accounting updates, and reading the raw figure without the current multiplier produces a number that looks like a price but isn't one yet.
A worked example
Topology's Units mode shows this explicitly: a raw figure of 229.5800, a current multiplier of ×1.0000, producing a displayed value of 229.580 — trivial here because the multiplier happens to sit at exactly 1.0 for this asset at this block. The previous multiplier, shown alongside it, was 0.9997, effective as of an earlier block. The gap between 0.9997 and 1.0000 is small, but it's the same kind of shift that, left untracked, quietly decouples a raw on-chain figure from what a price actually means.
Why this matters even when the multiplier is 1.0
It would be simpler to only surface the multiplier when it's doing something interesting. State.OS shows it on every read instead, specifically so the scaling step stays visible and auditable rather than assumed. A multiplier that's always quietly equal to 1.0 for one asset is itself useful information — it's confirmation that nothing has silently shifted, not an absence of something to show.