Slippage is the difference between the price you expected when you submitted a swap or order and the price you actually got when it executed. It is a price difference, not a fee charged by anyone.
You see a quote, you confirm, and the number in your wallet is worse than the number on screen. That gap is slippage. It happens because the quote is a snapshot and the trade takes time: between the moment the interface shows you a price and the moment the transaction is confirmed, the market can move, or your own order can move it.
Slippage is not automatically a mistake and it is not always negative. It is simply the label for a price that changed between expectation and execution. On a thin or fast-moving market, that change is usually big enough to notice.
Four things account for most of it:
A network fee is what the chain charges to process the transaction. A trading or protocol fee is what the venue charges for the service. The spread is the gap between the best bid and the best offer at a moment in time. Slippage is the change in the executed price relative to the price you expected. All four can make a trade cost more, but only one of them describes the quote-to-fill gap.
That distinction matters when you are working out what went wrong: a trade that filled at a bad price and a trade that charged a high fee are different problems with different remedies.
Slippage tolerance is the maximum price movement you permit before the swap is allowed to complete. If the price moves beyond that limit, the transaction is rejected rather than filled at the worse price. It is a guard rail on execution, not a discount, not a fee setting, and not a promise that you will get the quoted price.
Setting it very tight means more rejected transactions. Setting it very loose means you accept a worse fill. Neither end is free, so the useful habit is to set it in line with the liquidity and volatility of the pair you are actually trading.
No checklist removes slippage, but these are the things that make it predictable:
ZenZen prints trading in-jokes on shirts, socks and mugs. "Buy high, sell low" is our favourite self-own, and getting a worse price than the one on screen is exactly the sort of session that joke is about. This page exists because people search for the term; it is a definition, not a trading strategy, and nothing here is financial advice.
For the rest of the vocabulary, see the crypto slang glossary, the candlestick chart guide and the gift guide.
| What this page is | A plain-English explanation of slippage in crypto trading. |
|---|---|
| Who it is for | Anyone whose swap filled at a price they did not expect. |
| What it does not cover | No price predictions, no trading strategy, no advice to buy or sell anything. |
| Advice | None. Definitions only. Nothing here is financial advice. |
Slippage is the difference between the price you expected when you submitted a swap or order and the price you actually got when it executed. It is a price difference, not a fee charged by anyone.
No. A gas fee is what the network charges to process a transaction. Slippage is the change in the asset's price between the quote and the fill. They can both make a trade cost more, but they are separate things and appear separately in a transaction breakdown.
Slippage tolerance is the maximum price movement you tell a swap interface you will accept before the transaction is allowed to go through. If the price moves beyond that limit, the transaction is rejected instead of filling at the worse price.
Yes. Slippage only describes a difference between the expected and executed price. If the price moves in your favour between the quote and the fill, you receive a better price than the one shown. The term is neutral even though traders mostly notice the painful direction.
Because the swap is rejected when the price moves past the limit you set. On networks where a reverted transaction still consumes gas, a failed swap can leave you with the network cost and no trade. That is a reason to set tolerance deliberately rather than treating it as a free safety setting.
If your fills have a sense of humour, the Buy High, Sell Low tee is the honest summary. The rest of the range is in the crypto shirts shop.
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