Swaps and slippage

Where to swap

The swap form is on the home page, on every subnet page and on every validator page. Spot, in the Trade menu, has a compact Market form that trades free TAO against one subnet’s alpha.

How a swap is priced

Each subnet’s alpha trades against TAO in that subnet’s pool. The pool’s reserves of TAO and alpha set the price, and your trade moves it: the larger your trade compared with the pool, the more it moves.

• TAO to alpha, or alpha to TAO, goes through one pool.
• One alpha to another goes through TAO in a single transaction. The pool fee is charged once, on the subnet you sell.
• TAO to Staked TAO, and back, converts one for one on root, with no pool, no fee and no price impact.
• Moving stake to another validator on the same subnet is a one for one transfer, with no price impact. The button then reads Move Stake.

What the form shows

• You receive: the amount you should get, after the pool fee and the price impact.
• The exchange rate: the current pool price, before fee and impact.
• The price impact: how much worse your trade is than the current pool price, pool fee included. It turns amber from 1% and red from 5%.
• The estimated network fee.

When the price impact would cost you more than $100, a warning shows the amount and suggests splitting the trade. It does not block the swap.

The form shows no minimum received amount. Your protection is the price limit described below.

Slippage tolerance

Between the moment you sign and the moment your swap reaches a block, other trades can move the price. Slippage tolerance caps how far it may move against you.

Taoswap turns your tolerance into a price limit inside the transaction, and the chain enforces it. For a trade through one pool, the limit starts from the price your own trade leaves behind, so your price impact does not use up the tolerance: it only has to cover the market moving in the meantime. A swap from one alpha to another is bounded only approximately.

The default is 0.5%. You can pick 0.1%, 0.5% or 1%, or type any value from 0.1% to 50%. From 5%, the app warns that a swap can fill far below its quote.

To change it:

1. Press Slippage tolerance under the form. This opens Swap Settings.
2. Pick a value, or type your own.
3. Close the dialog with Done. Changes apply at once and are saved in this browser.

With limit orders, Swap Settings has two rows: Market slippage tolerance for swaps, and Limit slippage tolerance for limit orders.

When the price moves past your limit

By default, the chain refuses the whole swap, and the app says The price moved beyond your limit before execution. You keep your tokens, but the network fee is paid.

With Allow partial on, in Swap Settings, the chain fills only the part that fits within your limit. A MAX sale to TAO fills whole or not at all.

The TAO you keep for fees

Network fees come out of your free TAO. Keep in free balance, in Swap Settings, sets how much TAO MAX leaves in your wallet once the trade’s network fee is paid: 0.1 τ by default, 0.01 τ at least. A typed amount is not held to it.

See Fees for every cost of a swap, and MEV Shield for the protection settings in the same dialog.