CashboardGlossary · Trading
What is slippage?
Slippage is the gap between the price you expected when you sent a trade and the average price you actually got once it filled.
How does slippage work?
It comes from two places. One is price impact: your own order eats liquidity, so each unit fills a little worse than the one before. The other is movement: the market shifts between the quote you saw and the moment your transaction lands.
DEXs let you set a slippage tolerance, the worst price change you will accept before the swap reverts. Too tight and trades fail exactly when things get busy. Too loose and you are an easy target for a sandwich, where a bot buys just ahead of you and sells right after, at your expense.
Suppose you swap $5,000 of USDC for a token quoted at $1.00, expecting 5,000 tokens. The pool is thin and the price drifts while your transaction waits, so you receive 4,850. About $1.03 each. That is 3 percent slippage, and with a 1 percent tolerance the swap would have failed instead.
Deeper pools, and aggregators that split an order across several pools, shrink the impact part. On Solana, priority fees or Jito bundles get a transaction included faster during busy blocks, which trims the movement part.
Also called: price impact, slippage tolerance.
Where does slippage show up in Cashboard?
Cashboard does not execute swaps, so it never sets slippage for you. What it can do is warn you off a thin pool: the liquidity and 24h volume columns in Raydium pools and Trending on-chain give a rough idea of whether your size would move it before you trade somewhere else.
Frequently asked questions
What happens if slippage goes past my tolerance?
The swap reverts and nothing is traded. You usually still pay the network fee for the failed transaction, which is why a string of failed swaps on a busy day adds up.
Where can you read more about slippage?
Related terms
Last reviewed . Market data in Cashboard comes from the providers named on each widget and may be delayed. Nothing here is financial advice.