SNAP Basic Training 01: Swaps, Slippage, and Price Impact
You’ve clicked Swap a hundred times before. But do you know what actually happens when you do?
Behind every swap on SNAP, an invisible route-finder wakes up. It checks every pool that touches your pair, weighs their depth, and picks the path that gets you the best execution price. Sometimes it’s a straight line. Sometimes it hops through two or three pools to save a fraction of a percent. That fraction is your edge.
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What you see vs what you get
When you enter a swap, you’re given two numbers: Quote and Minimum received.
The quote is the price right now, before your trade hits the pool. The minimum received is the outcome after accounting for slippage — the change in price caused by your own trade moving the market.
The bigger your trade relative to the pool’s depth, the more it bends the price curve. That bend is slippage.
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Price impact, explained simply
Imagine a bucket of water that represents a liquidity pool. Drop a marble in — that’s a small swap, barely a ripple. Drop a brick — the surface shifts sharply. The brick didn’t change the bucket’s shape, just the distribution of water. Same with price impact: it’s not about manipulation, it’s about proportion.
The deeper the pool, the smaller the wave.
SNAP’s concentrated liquidity model intensifies this. Liquidity isn’t spread across every price; it’s packed tightly into active ranges. So when your trade lands inside a narrow band, you’re moving against fewer tokens — meaning more noticeable impact.
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How SNAP routes around slippage
SNAP’s router looks for the best overall path, not just the shortest. It might split your trade between multiple routes if that means less slippage. Think of it as choosing two side roads instead of one crowded highway. You still reach your destination, just more efficiently.
Fees: the quiet cost that pays LPs
Each swap also pays a small fee to liquidity providers in the pools your trade touches. Those LPs only earn while their ranges are “in play.” In the next mission, you’ll see how those fees stack up and why being in range matters.
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Your task
- Open SNAP and head to the Swap page.
- Choose any liquid pair - try
USDT/WETH. - Set slippage to 1% and make a tiny trade. Note your minimum received.
- Repeat with 0.1% slippage.
- Compare outcomes. That difference is your first tangible lesson in execution quality.
Write it down. You’re not aping, you’re observing.
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Mission takeaway
Every swap is a trade-off between size, depth, and timing. Understanding those three makes you harder to front-run and quicker to react. Slippage isn’t the enemy; it’s feedback - a signal about how much your trade matters in that pool.
In the next brief, BT-02: Fees 101, we’ll trace where those trading fees actually go, who earns them, and why volume and TVL are the twin engines of your LP returns.