What Is Slippage in Crypto — and the Setting You Should Change Instead

Slippage is the gap between the price you were quoted and the price you actually got. Your slippage tolerance is a setting: the maximum gap you will accept before the trade is cancelled instead of filled. Set it too tight and trades fail; set it too loose and you hand money to whoever is watching the mempool.

On small pools most of your slippage is not caused by anyone attacking you. It is caused by the size of your own order.

Why it happens

A trading pool holds two assets and prices them against each other by ratio. Buying a token removes some from the pool and adds ETH or SOL, which changes the ratio, which changes the price — during your own transaction.

So the quote you saw was the price before your trade existed. The price you get is the average across the move your trade caused. The bigger your order relative to the pool, the bigger that gap.

This is arithmetic, not a fee and not an attack. It happens on every automated exchange, for everyone, always.

The three sources

Your own size. The dominant one on thin pools. A $3,000 buy into a pool with $30,000 of liquidity is a tenth of the market and will move the price against you meaningfully in both directions.

Other people's trades. Between the moment you sign and the moment your transaction lands, other trades execute. On a busy token this genuinely moves the price.

Sandwiching. A bot sees your pending transaction, buys ahead of you, lets your buy push the price up, and sells into it. Your slippage tolerance is the budget it gets to work with — a 20% tolerance is an invitation to extract up to 20%.

Setting the tolerance

There is no correct number, only a correct method: raise it until the trade goes through, and not one step further.

Rough starting points:

• Deep, liquid pools: 0.5–1% is usually plenty.
• Ordinary small caps: 2–5%.
• Very thin pools or a volatile moment: 10%+ may be the only way to fill — and that is a signal about the pool, not just about the setting.

Some tokens have a transfer tax, and the tax is counted against your slippage tolerance. A token with a 5% buy tax cannot fill at 3% slippage no matter how calm the market is. If a trade keeps failing at a tolerance that should work, a tax is the likely reason — and it is worth knowing the sell tax before you buy, because that is the one that decides whether you can leave.

The setting people should change instead

Slippage tolerance gets all the attention. Position size decides the outcome.

If you are repeatedly forced to raise slippage to get filled, the trade is too large for the pool. The setting is telling you something true and people treat it as an obstacle. Halving the order size usually does more for the fill price than any tolerance adjustment, and it also fixes the exit — which is where the same problem is waiting.

That is the part that catches people. Slippage on the way in is annoying. Slippage on the way out is where the loss actually happens, because you are usually selling into less liquidity than you bought into, often while other people are selling too.

Look at the liquidity before the market cap. Market cap tells you what a token is theoretically worth. Liquidity tells you what you can get back out.

Failed transactions

A trade that reverts for slippage still costs gas. On a fast-moving token you can burn several attempts, and the instinct is to jump the tolerance to something large to guarantee a fill. That guarantees a fill at a price you did not consent to in any meaningful sense.

Better: raise it in steps, and if it still will not fill, take the hint. A token that cannot be entered at a sane tolerance usually cannot be exited at one either.

Slippage versus a honeypot

Worth separating, because the symptoms overlap.

Slippage means your trade fills at a worse price. A honeypot means your sell does not fill at all, or returns almost nothing regardless of tolerance.

If buys work and sells consistently fail at every tolerance, that is not slippage. That is the sell being blocked or taxed to nothing, and no setting fixes it. The way to know in advance is to simulate a sell against the contract before buying — a price chart cannot tell you, because a token nobody can sell has only buying pressure and therefore a beautiful chart.

The short version

• Slippage is the gap between quoted and filled price; tolerance is the maximum gap you accept.
• On thin pools, most of it is your own order size.
• Raise tolerance until it fills, no further — the tolerance is the budget a sandwich bot gets.
• Repeated failures at sane tolerance usually mean the position is too big, or the token has a tax.
• Check the sell before you buy. Tolerance cannot solve a contract that will not let you out.

PumpPill's scanner reports the buy and sell tax and whether the token can be sold at all, alongside the liquidity, on any Solana or Robinhood Chain address you paste.