Understanding Concentrated Liquidity

Concentrated Liquidity pools are liquidity pools on decentralized exchanges (DEX) in which you have to allocate liquidity in a custom price range.

Concentrated Liquidity pools are a type of liquidity pool on decentralized exchanges (DEX) that allow liquidity providers (LPs) to allocate their liquidity within a custom price range. This differs from traditional XYK liquidity pools, where liquidity is spread uniformly across the entire price range.

Key Takeaways

Concentrated Liquidity pools enable LPs to generate higher yields by focusing their capital within narrower price ranges.

LPs have full control over the price range and can adjust it anytime at will.

Adjusting price ranges frequently can be costly due to transaction and swap fees.

Understanding Concentrated Liquidity Pools

In essence, Concentrated Liquidity pools allow LPs to specify the lower and upper bounds of the price range within which their liquidity will be active. This means that LPs can now choose to generate trading fees only when the market price of an asset falls within their preferred price range.

For example, if an LP chooses to provide liquidity for the ETH/USDC pair within a 10% range, their liquidity will only be active and generate trading fees if the market price of Ether falls between $2,304.03 and $2,815.25. In other words, if the market price of Ether moves more than 10% in either direction (up or down), their liquidity now becomes out of range and will cease to accrue fees.

Benefits of Concentrated Liquidity Pools

The concept of Concentrated Liquidity was first introduced by Uniswap V3 in March 2021 to tackle the capital inefficiencies inherent in traditional XYK liquidity pools. In those traditional pools, liquidity was spread uniformly across the entire price range from $0 to ∞. While this approach guaranteed liquidity at every price level regardless of market volatility, most of this liquidity went unused.

With Concentrated Liquidity, LPs can now focus their capital within narrower price ranges, enhancing capital efficiency and ultimately boosting their yields. For example, if an LP chooses to concentrate their liquidity within a 1% price range, their capital utilization will be significantly higher compared to an LP who chooses to spread their liquidity across a 10% price range.

Moreover, Concentrated Liquidity pools offer LPs a high degree of flexibility and control over how they choose to allocate their capital. In doing so, they can sometimes experience very lucrative yields; however, they are highly variable because the yield depends on their choice of price ranges.

For example, on Ambient Finance, Concentrated Liquidity yields varies based on the price ranges chosen by each liquidity provider:

On the other hand, taking a look at the classic example of XYK-pools on Syncswap, all liquidity providers receive 8.94% yields.

Notice in the above examples, Concentrated Liquidity yields vary from 0.18% to 284.19%. This is because each liquidity position generates its own set of yield. Yield is no longer shared in a communal pool like in Syncswap’s XYK pools whereby all liquidity providers experience the same yield, 8.94%.

Drawbacks of Concentrated Liquidity Pools

While lucrative, Concentrated Liquidity positions require more effort to upkeep and there are multiple pitfalls that you have to watch out for.

Increased OversightAs mentioned above, whenever your Concentrated Liquidity goes out of range, you will no longer be accruing fees. This means that Concentrated Liquidity positions require active monitoring as compared to the more passive XYK liquidity pools.

Here’s an example of what kind of oversight may be needed.

In the above example, the TIA/ETH liquidity position on Trader Joe is out of range. In order to fix this, you would have to first, remove your liquidity position, update your preferred liquidity provision range to current market prices and then redeposit the liquidity.

If you don’t adjust your liquidity position when it goes out of range, you won’t generate any yield. However, be cautious, as frequently updating the price ranges of your Concentrated Liquidity positions can be expensive. Balancing between the safety of a broader price range and the higher yields from a narrower range is often a complex choice.

Potentially Higher Impermanent LossIn Concentrated Liquidity positions, whenever your position goes out of range, your liquidity becomes entirely denominated in one asset. For instance, in the example above, a previous 50/50 split of TIA/ETH has shifted entirely to ETH due to TIA’s relative price increase compared to ETH at the time of writing.

This differs from XYK pools, where your liquidity remains partially in both assets due to the infinite price range. As a result, impermanent loss can be more pronounced in Concentrated Liquidity pools compared to XYK pools.

Frequently Asked Questions

What Are Trading Bins?The introduction of Concentrated Liquidity leads to the creation of the now widely used term “Trading Bins”. Concentrated Liquidity divides the previously continuous spectrum of price space into discrete segments, with Trading Bins representing the nominal boundaries for liquidity positions. While some DEX

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