Course Content
Impermanent Loss Explained
If you’ve been involved with DeFi at all, you almost certainly heard this term thrown around. Impermanent loss happens when the price of your tokens changes compared to when you deposited them in the pool. The larger the change is, the bigger the loss. Wait, so I can lose money by providing liquidity? And why is the loss impermanent? Well, it comes from an inherent design characteristic of a special kind of market called an automated market maker. Providing liquidity to a liquidity pool can be a profitable venture, but you’ll need to keep the concept of impermanent loss in mind.
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Introduction
What is impermanent loss?
How does impermanent loss happen?
Impermanent loss estimation
The risks of providing liquidity to an AMM
Closing thoughts
Impermanent Loss Explained
About Lesson

Let’s go through an example of how impermanent loss may look like for a liquidity provider.

Alice deposits 1 ETH and 100 DAI in a liquidity pool. In this particular automated market maker (AMM), the deposited token pair needs to be of equivalent value. This means that the price of ETH is 100 DAI at the time of deposit. This also means that the dollar value of Alice’s deposit is 200 USD at the time of deposit.

In addition, there’s a total of 10 ETH and 1,000 DAI in the pool – funded by other LPs just like Alice. So, Alice has a 10% share of the pool, and the total liquidity is 10,000.

Let’s say that the price of ETH increases to 400 DAI. While this is happening, arbitrage traders will add DAI to the pool and remove ETH from it until the ratio reflects the current price. Remember, AMMs don’t have order books. What determines the price of the assets in the pool is the ratio between them in the pool. While liquidity remains constant in the pool (10,000), the ratio of the assets in it changes.

If ETH is now 400 DAI, the ratio between how much ETH and how much DAI is in the pool has changed. There is now 5 ETH and 2,000 DAI in the pool, thanks to the work of arbitrage traders.

So, Alice decides to withdraw her funds. As we know from earlier, she’s entitled to a 10% share of the pool. As a result, she can withdraw 0.5 ETH and 200 DAI, totaling 400 USD. She made some nice profits since her deposit of tokens worth 200 USD, right? But wait, what would have happened if she simply holds her 1 ETH and 100 DAI? The combined dollar value of these holdings would be 500 USD now.

We can see that Alice would have been better off by HODLing rather than depositing into the liquidity pool. This is what we call impermanent loss. In this case, Alice’s loss wasn’t that substantial as the initial deposit was a relatively small amount. Keep in mind, however, that impermanent loss can lead to big losses (including a significant portion of the initial deposit).

With that said, Alice’s example completely disregards the trading fees she would have earned for providing liquidity. In many cases, the fees earned would negate the losses and make providing liquidity profitable nevertheless. Even so, it’s crucial to understand impermanent loss before providing liquidity to a DeFi protocol.

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