A price feed is the stream of prices that a tokenized asset, a checkout, or a settlement policy listens to. For a tokenized stock it is the program's own source for the underlying's price; for a checkout it is the FX or market table that converts an invoice currency into the asset being paid.
Feeds fail in two directions: stale (the price was right an hour ago) and thin (the price comes from a pool too small to absorb size). Robust systems name their feed per asset kind (market feeds for market assets, FX tables for pegs) instead of pretending one source fits both.
A price feed is the mechanism that puts an external price on-chain: a signed stream from an issuer, an aggregated oracle network, or a pool-derived rate, delivered at some cadence for contracts to consume. For tokenized assets the feed is the market: between sessions and between trades, the signed number is what the asset prices from.
Feed design makes choices that users inherit. Cadence sets freshness, from seconds to minutes. Source decides what is being measured: a mid price, a bid-ask mark, a pool ratio, or a multi-venue composite. Bounds, such as deviation thresholds and staleness cutoffs, decide what happens when data goes strange: hold last, halt, or widen.
Payments consume feeds wherever conversion is referenced, and tokenized equities consume them as the primary price. The honest questions for any feed-dependent flow are which feed, how fresh, and what fails safe. Systems that answer those visibly are auditable; systems that do not are faith-based.
A tokenized stock's page states its pricing: the issuer's feed, bid-ask mid with the current token-per-share multiplier, refreshed every few minutes. A swap against the token between sessions prices from that feed, which is why it can hold still while crypto does not.
U.CASH prices each asset from the feed appropriate to its kind: on-chain markets for crypto, issuer feeds for tokenized equities, and fiat FX tables for stablecoin pricing. Asset and rail pages state which is in use.
Merchants meet feeds at conversion: checkout quoting, auto-conversion of receipts, and tokenized asset pricing. Quoting is live and bound at signature, so the operational exposure is the time between quote and confirm, which policy keeps short. The habit to build is asking the feed question whenever a number moves money: what told it that price, and when. On U.CASH the answer is stated per asset, issuer feeds for tokenized positions and composite sources for conversion quoting. The question generalizes well beyond this platform, and its absence from a product's documentation is itself an answer.
Every term behind the rails, the assets, and the settlement.