Slippage
Last updated 17 October 2026Last verified 17 October 2026
What is slippage in DeFi?
The difference between the expected and executed price of a trade. Higher on illiquid pairs or large orders. AMM slippage is deterministic from pool depth; order-book slippage depends on market conditions at execution time. Setting slippage tolerance too high invites sandwich attacks; setting it too low causes frequent failed transactions.
TradFi equivalentMarket impact, and only the impact and delay components of implementation shortfall rather than the whole of it. On an automated market maker the impact is a published function of pool depth rather than a modeled estimate, but that depth can be moved by another trade in the same block, which is why the realized cost still departs from the quote.