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What is price impact?
Price impact is how much your own trade moves the price. On an automated market maker, each unit you buy or sell shifts the pool's balance, so a larger trade gets a worse average price. The more liquidity a pool has, the smaller the impact of a given trade.
What it means for you
Price impact is a cost you cause, separate from fees and from slippage. A high figure on a swap screen means you would sell a meaningful share of the pool and receive much less than the quoted price. Splitting the amount does not remove it if the pool stays thin.
How it works
On a constant-product pool (x × y = k), the price shifts continuously during your own swap: each unit you buy removes some of that token from the reserve, so the next unit costs more. Your average price is therefore worse than the starting price, and the gap grows with your trade's share of the pool; the same trade against a deeper pool moves the price less. Price impact happens even if nobody else trades. Slippage is the separate change caused by other trades while yours is pending.
An example
Say a pool holds 100 of token A and 10,000 of token B. Selling 10 A returns about 909 B, not the 1,000 the starting price suggests: roughly 9% price impact. Against a pool of 1,000 A and 100,000 B, the same 10 A returns about 990 B, roughly 1%.
Sources: Uniswap docs: Swaps, Uniswap docs: How Uniswap works · checked 4 October 2026
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Educational content, not financial advice. Written by hand and checked against the source named above. Something wrong? Tell us and we reply within two business days.