A sell order that waits its turn
Say you hold 10,000 USDC and won’t take less than 0.8915 euros for each one. A limit order lets you post exactly that. The SEC’s bulletin on order types sets out the rule, a sell limit “can only be executed at the limit price or higher”, and warns that a limit order “is not guaranteed to execute.”
Here is where that order would have landed on exchange Kraken’s public USDC/EUR order book as it stood on November 10, 2026, at 10:13:50 UTC. Buyers were bidding 0.8911 at best, so nothing would have filled. The order would have joined the sellers at 0.8915, behind 156,361.923 USDC already offered at that price.
Cheaper offers stood in front as well, 1,021,272.737 USDC priced from 0.8912 to 0.8914. Buyers would have had to take all of it, then the older orders at 0.8915, before a single coin of yours sold, because Kraken’s trading rules match by price first and arrival time second.
The settings you’re asked for
Prices have to sit on the exchange’s grid. Kraken’s pair data that morning gave USDC/EUR a tick size of 0.0001, a minimum order of 5 USDC and a minimum order value of 0.45 euros. Coinbase’s product list used the same 0.0001 step for USDC-EUR, and its API documentation says a price off that increment is rejected.
Every order also carries an expiry, called time in force. Kraken offers good till canceled, good till date and immediate or cancel. In US stock trading an order with no stated expiry is a day order that lapses at the close, the SEC bulletin says, but Kraken’s platform runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week. A good-till-canceled order there stays until it fills or you cancel it.
A post-only setting makes the order cancel itself instead of filling at once, which keeps it on the cheaper side of maker-taker fees.
Where people get caught
The money is locked while you wait. Kraken’s rules say the amount of an unfilled order “is subject to a hold” until it executes or is canceled, so the 10,000 USDC in the example could not be withdrawn or sent to an off-ramp in the meantime.
Editing the price costs your place. When a limit price is amended, the same rules say, the order goes “at the back of the new price queue.”
A limit that is never reached never fills, however close the market came. Kraken’s order types page says there is “no guarantee the order will completely fill (or fill at all).” Before you leave a resting order, check its expiry and how much stands ahead of it in the queue.