Two costs hide behind one complaint, and separating them is the difference between fixing the problem and repeating it.

Price impact is your own trade

Because an AMM derives price from its reserve ratio, your order moves the price as it executes. The first unit trades near the quoted price and the last trades meaningfully away from it, and you pay the average.

This is entirely deterministic. Given the pool’s reserves and your size, the cost is calculable before you trade, and it is not bad luck or a bad fill — it is the price of the size you chose against the depth that exists. It scales sharply: doubling your order more than doubles the impact.

Slippage is everyone else

Slippage is what changed between the moment you were quoted and the moment your transaction settled. Other trades landed in front of yours, the reserves moved, and the price you got was not the price you saw.

This one is not deterministic, and it is why transactions carry a slippage tolerance. Set it too tight and the trade reverts — you pay the network fee and get nothing. Set it too loose and you have signed a blank cheque for a worse price, which is precisely the opening that sandwich attacks exist to exploit.

Why the distinction changes what you do

They have opposite remedies. Price impact is solved by trading smaller, or by trading somewhere deeper — more tolerance does nothing at all, because the cost is structural. Slippage is a timing and settlement problem: it responds to tolerance settings, to how congested the network is, and to how visible your order was before it landed.

Misdiagnose it and you make things worse. A trader who widens tolerance to fix price impact has not reduced a single basis point of the real cost and has handed away protection against the other one.

The number that actually matters

Not the quoted price. The round trip at your size. A pool that looks deep enough to enter can be expensive enough to make the exit the whole trade, which is the point made in on-chain liquidity versus an order book: on a token with no options book and no perp, the exit is the risk that dominates.

The NoVo Crypto Market Map reads cost to move a pool as a first-class figure rather than a footnote to depth, for that reason.