Plain English

A pool is a pile of two tokens that people trade against. Providing liquidity means adding to that pile. Traders pay a fee on every swap, and that fee is split between everyone who contributed — in proportion to how much of the pile is theirs.

You are not lending and nobody is borrowing. You are the other side of other people's trades, and the fee is what you are paid for being there.

Someone providing liquidity. If you deposit here, that is you.

One vault per pool. It holds a single liquidity position on your behalf, collects the fees, converts them to USDC and pays them out. You get shares in return, which are your claim on what it holds.

The point of a vault is that collecting fees is otherwise manual work: you would have to call the pool yourself, pay gas, and end up holding whichever token the fees arrived in.

Your receipt. Shares are an ordinary token, so they sit in your wallet and can be sent anywhere — and whoever holds them can withdraw the underlying liquidity.

One caveat worth knowing: unclaimed rewards stay with whoever earned them, not with the shares. Sending shares does not send the USDC you have accrued.

A percentage of every trade, set by the pool, paid by the trader to the liquidity providers. A 1% pool takes 1% of each swap. That is the entire source of yield here — nothing is minted, nobody is diluted, and if the pool is quiet you earn little.

Collecting the fees the position has accrued and starting to pay them out. Anyone can trigger it, and deposits and withdrawals do it automatically on the way through.

Harvested fees are paid out evenly over seven days rather than all at once. This is deliberate: paid instantly, somebody could deposit moments before a harvest, take a share of fees earned over days they were not present for, and leave. Streaming makes that cost a week of exposure, which is no longer free money.

Instead of paying some harvested fees out, putting them back into the position as more liquidity. No new shares are created, so every existing share becomes worth slightly more.

The current payout rate, annualised. It is arithmetic on what the pool earned recently, not a promise — a busy hour makes it read high and it decays as that week's stream unwinds. Treat it as a run-rate, not a rate of return.

A liquidity position automatically sells the token as its price rises and buys as it falls. If the price moves a long way in either direction, you end up with less value than if you had simply held the two tokens — the fees you earned have to make up the difference.

"Impermanent" is a misleading name: the loss only reverses if the price comes back. On a volatile token it can easily exceed everything you earn in fees. It is the main risk of providing liquidity anywhere, not something specific to this app. More on risks.

The gap between the price you were quoted and the price you actually get, because the market moved in between. Every deposit and withdrawal here carries a minimum you are willing to accept; if reality comes in below it, the transaction reverts and you keep your money.

Before you stake, the app runs the whole transaction against the chain without sending it, and reads back what it would return. That is a quote: it has already paid the entry fee, done the swap, and been through whatever the pool's hook does. The minimum written into your transaction is a slippage tolerance below that number.

An estimate is what you see before you have approved the vault to move your USDC — nothing can be simulated until then, so the panel falls back to arithmetic. It is labelled as an estimate because it cannot see a hook's cut and will read slightly high on pools that have one.

Hundredths of a percent. 100 bps is 1%, 50 bps is 0.5%. Used because "a 0.5% increase on a 1% fee" is ambiguous and "50 bps" is not.

The average price over a window of time — here, thirty minutes. Used instead of the current price whenever the vault has to trade, because the current price can be pushed around within a single block by anyone willing to spend enough, while an average cannot be moved without holding the price there for the whole window.

This is why a freshly listed pool takes about half an hour before single-sided deposits work: there is no way to have a thirty-minute average without thirty minutes.

The vault only trades while the current price sits close to that average. If a token has just moved sharply the two diverge, the vault refuses to swap, and single-sided deposits pause until things settle. It is a deliberate refusal, not a fault — and two-sided deposits, withdrawals and claims never swap, so they are unaffected.

Anything that calls the public maintenance functions: recording a price, harvesting, compounding. None of them can move money anywhere it was not already going, so anyone may run one. Slice runs one covering every pool. What it does.

Extra code a Uniswap v4 pool can run on every trade — launchpads use them to take a cut. Slice refuses any pool whose hook could interfere with a withdrawal, because on a vault other people deposit into that is a trap rather than a fee.

The vault provides liquidity across every possible price rather than a narrow band. It earns less per pound than a tight range would while the price sits still, and never falls out of range and stops earning entirely — which a tight range does the moment the market leaves it.

How finely a pool divides the price scale. It is part of a pool's identity, which is why the app reads it from the chain rather than asking you: two pools on the same token with different tick spacing are genuinely different pools.

Anyone can do it, and no one can stop them or is needed to approve it. Listing a pool and running a keeper are both permissionless here. It describes who may act — not whether anything needs doing.

The fee paid to the network to process a transaction — separate from anything Slice charges, and paid whether or not the transaction succeeds. On Arc it is paid in USDC, so you need a little USDC in your wallet to do anything at all.

A dollar-denominated stablecoin. Arc is unusual in that USDC is also the asset gas is paid in, which is why rewards here arrive as USDC rather than as a token you would have to sell. More on Arc.