Guides
All 59 guides, in reading order.
Four tracks, from how a pool prices a trade through to concentrated liquidity, onchain metrics and market structure. Every guide is dated, sourced and reviewed before publication.
Foundations: how a pool works.
What Is a Liquidity Pool? How DeFi Liquidity Pools Work
A plain-English guide to liquidity pools: how a pool sets its price, why deep beats big, what you really earn, and what you take on when you deposit.
Liquidity Pools for Beginners: Five Decisions, In Order
Five decisions settle almost everything about how your first position turns out. None requires predicting a price, and the yield is the last thing to check.
What Is a Liquidity Provider? The LP Role, Explained
You become a market maker who cannot cancel. What the job pays, what it costs, and the one question to answer honestly before you take it on.
Automated Market Makers Explained: How an AMM Actually Works
How an AMM quotes a price from its own reserves, what three generations of design changed, where your execution cost really comes from, and what to check first.
AMM vs. Order Book: Three Ways to Get a Trade Done
Three ways to get a trade done, what each costs, and a decision rule you can actually remember. Plus why the good flow is quietly leaving pools.
The Constant Product Formula: How x × y = k Shapes AMM Prices
What x × y = k actually does to your trade: why the quote is never your fill, how impact scales with size, and how other curves change the answer.
Slippage and Price Impact: What a Swap Actually Costs
Two different costs, one word. One you can compute before you sign. The other is whatever your tolerance setting tells bots they are allowed to take.
Liquidity Pool Tokens Explained: What an LP Position Represents
What you get back for a deposit: how pool shares, position NFTs, in-contract balances and vault shares each track your money, and what to check first.
Types of Liquidity Pools: Matching the Curve to the Pair
Six pool families, what each one is built for, and what the same deposit does in each. Picking the wrong curve is a quiet mistake that can cost you.
Lending Pool vs Liquidity Pool: Two Different Instruments
Same word, different thing. One pays you for time and keeps your tokens. The other pays you for trades and changes them. Plus a worked rate comparison.
Liquidity Pool vs Staking: Two Different Payoffs
Staking keeps your token count intact and grows it. A pool changes what you hold. Same kind of quoted rate, completely different instruments.
TVL Explained: What Total Value Locked Can—and Cannot—Tell You
How one dollar becomes five dollars of headline deposits, why a big pool can fill your trade worse than a smaller one, and what to read instead.
APR vs APY in DeFi: How to Read a Pool Yield Quote
Two pools quoting different numbers can pay exactly the same. How to convert any quote to a comparable figure, and the six costs no headline rate includes.
Onchain Liquidity: How Decentralized Markets Are Assembled
There is no single onchain market. Five layers stitch thousands of independent pools into something that behaves like one, and each takes a share of your trade.
LP mechanics: what a position does.
How to Provide Liquidity: A Mechanism-First Walkthrough
Every choice in the deposit screen is a decision about what you will be holding later. What each one does, two worked scenarios, and the sums that decide it.
Liquidity Provider Fees: How LP Revenue Is Generated and Measured
Where the fee actually goes, why it differs by pool generation, and the one subtraction that turns a fee number into an actual return.
Uniswap Fee Tiers Explained: Choosing 1, 5, 30, or 100 bps
The tier with the biggest number usually earns the least. Why routers decide your income, and how to pick a tier from measured volume rather than instinct.
Uniswap v2 vs v3: Which Liquidity Position Suits You
v2 is a deposit. v3 is a job. The efficiency multiplier is real while you are in range, and here is what it looks like after you multiply by time in range.
Concentrated Liquidity Explained: Range, Capital Efficiency, and Risk
Picking a price range multiplies your fees and your losses by the same number. How the maths works, how wide to go, and what happens when the price leaves.
Uniswap v3 Ticks and Position NFTs Explained
Why your range moved from what you typed, why your fees stopped, and why your position is an NFT. Four contract details that explain most operational surprises.
Concentrated Liquidity Strategy: Choosing a Range Width
The width is the only thing you control. Set it from how much the pair actually moves and how much attention you have, not from a yield you would like.
Out-of-Range Liquidity: Why an LP Position Stops Earning Fees
Your position stopped earning because the price left your band. What you are holding now, what waiting costs, and how to decide whether to move it.
Range Orders on AMMs: How Liquidity Can Express a Price View
A one-sided deposit works like a limit order that earns fees while it fills. It also un-fills if the price comes back, which is what catches people out.
Single-Sided Liquidity: What One-Sided Provision Really Does
Depositing one token does not avoid holding two. It changes when the second one arrives and lets you choose the price, a real advantage with a real cost.
Stablecoin Liquidity Pools: Efficient Curves and Depeg Risk
Why stablecoin pools feel safe, exactly how they fail, and the one number to watch that tells you to leave before the price does.
Balancer Weighted Pools: How 80/20 and Multi-Asset Pools Work
Why an 80/20 pool sells less of your token on the way up, how weighted pricing works, what a liquidity bootstrapping pool does, and what Balancer v3 changed.
Curve v2 Explained: Cryptoswap, Internal Oracles and TriCrypto Pools
How Curve v2 moves its own liquidity to follow the market, why it only pays for that out of fees, and when a TriCrypto pool is and is not the right place to be.
DLMM Explained: Bin-Based Liquidity, Dynamic Fees and Meteora
How bin-based pools give trades a flat price, how the fee raises itself when the market moves fast, and how to shape your deposit across the bins.
Meteora DLMM Strategy: Bin Step, Shape and When Positions Stop Earning
How to choose a bin step and shape on Meteora DLMM, what the volatility accumulator does to your fee rate, and rebalancing rules for a fast Solana market.
Raydium Liquidity Pools: CLMM, CPMM and Choosing Between Them
How Raydium's concentrated and constant-product pools differ, what a CLMM position holds at each end of its range, and the Solana checks to run first.
Uniswap v4 Architecture: Singleton Design, Hooks, and Flash Accounting
What changed in Uniswap v4 and what it means for you: one contract for every pool, settle-once accounting, custom pool code, and how to read a hook.
Risk and research: what it can cost.
Can You Lose Money in a Liquidity Pool? Six Loss Paths
Six separate ways a pool position loses money, roughly how much each one costs, and the order to check them in when a position is down.
Liquidity Pool Risks: A Complete Framework for LP Due Diligence
Five layers of risk in a liquidity pool: the code, the traders, the collateral behind the tokens, the price feeds, and the people who can change the rules.
Impermanent Loss Explained: Why Pools Trail Simply Holding
Why a pool position falls behind simply holding, how much at each price move, and the cost volatility adds that fees have to cover.
The Impermanent Loss Formula: How to Calculate IL Step by Step
One short formula, one variable, and a full worked example in dollars. Plus the range-position variant and everything the formula deliberately leaves out.
Impermanent Loss Examples: Five Positions, Fully Worked
Five real positions in dollars: a small drift, a doubling, a four-times run, a halving, and a stablecoin breaking. Each one with the fees needed to break even.
How to Avoid Impermanent Loss (and What Each Method Costs)
You cannot remove it while quoting two assets. Six things genuinely reduce it, each buys the reduction with something else, and here is what each one costs.
LP Fees vs Impermanent Loss: Finding the Break-Even
One inequality decides whether a pool is worth supplying. Here it is, worked on a real position, plus why the fee side is capped and the loss side is not.
Is Providing Liquidity Profitable? The Full Arithmetic
It depends on numbers you can get before depositing, and almost nobody gets them. Here is the inequality, every term in it, and two positions worked in full.
Gas Costs for Liquidity Providers: The Minimum Viable Position
Gas does not scale with your position, so it decides which strategies you can even use. One table tells you whether yours is viable before you deposit.
How to Evaluate a Liquidity Pool: A Five-Part Research Framework
Five questions that tell you whether a pool is worth your money, in the order that matters, with the arithmetic that settles most cases in under a minute.
Rug Pulls and Locked Liquidity: Six Checks Before You Deposit
Six checks you can run from public chain data in ten minutes. None needs code reading, and together they catch almost every failure visible in advance.
Liquidity Depth and Execution: The Only Number That Trades
Two pools of the same size can cost seven times as much to trade against. How to measure what actually fills your order, and why it vanishes under stress.
Token Liquidity Analysis: Measuring What Can Actually Be Sold
How to measure a token's real liquidity: active depth, exit size, venue spread, holder concentration, volume quality and lock status, from public chain data.
Onchain Liquidity Metrics: What to Measure Beyond TVL and Volume
The five numbers that decide whether a pool is worth your money, why the two headline figures mislead, and two pools whose dashboards point the wrong way.
MEV and Liquidity Providers: Sandwiches, JIT Liquidity and Toxic Flow
Three ways transaction ordering takes money out of your pool position, how to tell how much is happening, and what actually defends against each one.
Cross-Chain Liquidity Explained: Bridges, Fragmentation and Risk
Tokens never actually cross between chains. The four designs that make it look as if they do, how bridges have failed, and what to check before you bridge.
Advanced: the wider market.
Loss-Versus-Rebalancing: The LP's Real Hurdle Rate
The number your fees actually have to beat. How it differs from impermanent loss, how to work it out in ten seconds, and what pools are doing to shrink it.
Bonding Curves and AMM Invariants: How Curve Shape Sets Risk
A pool is a curve plus a fee. The shape of the curve decides your execution, how fast your holdings rotate, and exactly which failure you are underwriting.
Dynamic Fees in AMMs: Charging for Volatility
A fixed fee is wrong most of the time. Too dear in calm markets, far too cheap when somebody is picking you off. What moving fees fix, and what they cannot.
Market Making on AMMs: How Professional Liquidity Providers Work
What professional liquidity providers actually do: sizing ranges to volatility, hedging price risk, clearing the LVR hurdle, and reading vault strategies.
The Liquidity Pool Research Checklist: Questions to Ask Before You Act
Five groups of checks to run before you deposit: the contract, the tokens, the trading, the maths, and getting your money back out.
Real Yield in Liquidity Pools: Who Actually Pays You
Two pools quote 24%. One is paid by traders, the other by a printer. Both figures are accurate and they describe completely different instruments.
Liquidity Mining Explained: Incentives, Emissions and Lasting Depth
Where a headline yield really comes from, four generations of incentive design, and how to tell a pool that outlives its rewards from one that empties.
Liquidity Mining vs Yield Farming vs Staking: Who Pays You
Three different activities quoted as one number. Who pays you in each, what you risk, and the same $25,000 run through all three for a year.
Yield Farming Explained: Fee Income, Emissions, and Dilution
One question tells you whether a farm is worth anything: if the rewards stopped tomorrow, what would this position earn? Everything follows from that.
Uniswap Liquidity Pools: How v2, v3 and v4 Pools Work
Three generations of Uniswap pools run side by side. What each one asks you to decide, what your position actually holds, and how to pick a tier and a range.
PancakeSwap Liquidity Pools: Structure, Fees and Incentives
How PancakeSwap liquidity pools work, how their fee tiers and CAKE emissions differ from a fee-funded pool, and what to check before supplying one.
Uniswap v3 vs v4 Liquidity: What Actually Changed for LPs
Side-by-side for LPs: same range math in both versions, cheaper settlement in v4, and a migration decision that depends on depth, gas, and hook risk.