Reading the Impact Table
What the impact table actually shows
Every coin page has a size ladder — a small table showing estimated price impact at different trade sizes: 0.5 SOL, 1 SOL, 5 SOL, 10 SOL, and so on. Each row answers one question: "if I trade this much right now, how far will the price move against me?"
This isn't a fee. It's the cost of your own order pushing through the available liquidity. Small pools move a lot on modest size; deep pools barely move at all. The table exists so you can see this before you commit, not after your fill comes back worse than expected.
Why size ladders matter more than a single quote
A single quote only tells you the impact for one specific amount. But your actual order size might change — you might scale in, add more, or split a trade. Looking at the whole ladder tells you the *shape* of the liquidity, not just one point on it.
Two coins can show 0.3% impact at 1 SOL and look identical at that size. But if one jumps to 8% impact at 10 SOL and the other stays under 1%, that's a completely different risk profile. You only see that difference by scanning the ladder, not by checking a single quote.
A concrete example
Say you're looking at a mid-cap Solana token with roughly $180k in pool liquidity. The impact table shows:
- 0.5 SOL → 0.4% impact
- 1 SOL → 0.9% impact
- 5 SOL → 4.2% impact
- 10 SOL → 11.5% impact
If your plan was to put in 8 SOL, the ladder tells you that's already in territory between the 5 and 10 SOL rows — call it 8-9% impact. That's before slippage tolerance, before any price movement during confirmation. On a $180k pool, an 8 SOL order (at, say, $150/SOL, that's $1,200) is genuinely large relative to available depth, and the table is showing you that plainly.
Compare that to a token with $4M in liquidity, where even 20 SOL might show under 1% impact. Same trade size, completely different risk, and the ladder makes that visible in seconds.
Reading it before you size, not after
The order of operations matters. Check the ladder first, decide your size based on what you see, then place the order — not the other way around. If you decide on a size first and only check impact afterward, you're just confirming a decision you've already emotionally committed to, which makes it harder to scale down even when the numbers say you should.
A rough rule some traders use: if your intended size shows impact above what you'd accept as a straight-up cost (say, more than 2-3% for a normal trade), that's a signal to either reduce size, split the order into pieces over time, or skip the trade if the token doesn't have the depth to support it right now.
Common mistake
Treating the impact number as fixed. It's not — it changes as the pool's liquidity changes, sometimes within minutes if there's active trading. Checking the ladder once in the morning and trading on it in the afternoon can mean you're looking at stale numbers, especially on lower-liquidity tokens where a few large trades can shift depth noticeably.
On MAPLUStrade
MAPLUStrade shows the size ladder directly on every coin page, refreshed live so you're not working from a stale snapshot. Before sizing an order, scan the full ladder rather than just the row closest to your planned size — the shape across rows tells you how the token behaves as size increases, which is often more useful than any single number. Pair this with the platform's slippage tolerance setting so your tolerance and the pool's actual depth are working together, not against each other.
Recap
The impact table shows how your own order size moves the price, and scanning the full ladder — not just one row — reveals how deep or shallow a pool really is.
*This is educational content, not financial advice. Trading carries risk, including loss of principal.*