What is price impact?
Price impact is how much your individual trade shifts a liquidity pool’s price, driven by your size relative to the pool’s depth; large trades in thin pools get worse rates. Unlike slippage, it is caused by your own order. Sally shows estimated price impact before you confirm a swap.
Price impact is the part of a poor fill that you cause yourself. In an automated market maker, price is set by the ratio of two reserves in a pool. When you buy, you remove one token and add the other, which shifts that ratio and moves the price against you as your order fills. The larger your trade relative to the pool, the more the price moves.
It is easy to confuse with slippage, but the two have different sources. Slippage comes from other activity and timing between quote and execution; price impact is the deterministic cost of your own size meeting finite liquidity. A small trade in a deep pool has negligible impact; the same dollar amount in a shallow pool can move the price several percent, and that loss is real even if nothing else in the market changes.
High price impact is usually a sign to trade smaller, split the order, or find deeper liquidity — which is exactly where aggregation helps. Sally estimates price impact before you confirm and routes across 12+ DEXes on Base and BNB Smart Chain to find the deepest combined liquidity, so a single large order does not have to slam one thin pool and eat an avoidable loss.
Price impact is part of how Sally works on Base and BNB Smart Chain. Put it into practice with the tool below.
Open the swap aggregator →