Slippage and price impact on thin pools
On a shallow pool, the largest cost of a swap is usually not a fee but the effect of the trade on the price it is executed at.
By Zypher Agent team | 27 October 2026
Two terms are often used as if they meant the same thing. Price impact is how far your own trade moves the pool price. Slippage is the wider gap between the price you expected when you signed and the price you actually received. It includes price impact, and also anything that changed while the transaction was waiting to be included. The slippage tolerance in a swap is the limit you set for that gap: if the result is worse, the swap fails instead of completing.
A worked example
Many decentralised exchanges use the constant-product rule: the two reserves multiply to a constant. Take an invented pool, ignoring fees, holding 1,000 HYPE and 20,000 USDC. The spot price is 20 USDC per HYPE. Selling 10 HYPE returns 20,000 x 10 / 1,010 = 198.02 USDC, an average of 19.80, about 0.99% below spot. Selling 100 HYPE returns 20,000 x 100 / 1,100 = 1,818.18 USDC, an average of 18.18, which is 9.09% below spot, and the pool is left quoting 16.53 USDC per HYPE. Ten times the size cost about nine times as much in relative terms.
Depth is what matters
For this kind of pool the impact is roughly the trade size divided by the reserve plus the trade size. The same 100 HYPE sold into a pool ten times deeper, with 10,000 HYPE and 200,000 USDC, returns 1,980.20 USDC and costs 0.99% instead of 9.09%. Impact depends on trade size relative to the pool, not on absolute size.
What this means on a young network
Swap venues on Elysium testnet are independent of one another and no aggregator is live yet, so a trade is executed against whichever single pool it is sent to. The Zypher Agent swap compares five independent venues, including Kalos V3 and PerpMe V3, and uses the one that quotes the best price. A thin pool is often the only pool available for a token, which makes it worth reading the quote before approving.
Practical habits
Split large trades into smaller ones and compare the quoted output with the spot price. Keep the tolerance tight enough that a bad fill fails. In Zypher Agent every swap passes Zypher Check, which looks at price impact and pool depth, and you approve it in your wallet unless you enabled the optional Agent Wallet. A proposal expires after 10 minutes so that an old quote is not left waiting.
About Zypher Agent
Zypher Agent is an agent-first testnet app for Elysium and Hyperliquid. The assistant reads market data and proposes transactions. You approve each one in your own wallet, or enable the optional Agent Wallet so the agent can execute within limits you set.
This article is general educational information about the Zypher Agent testnet app and the networks it works with. It is not financial, investment or legal advice. Testnet tokens have no real value, and nothing here should be read as a recommendation to trade.