Liquidation Queue Latency

Liquidation queue latency is the delay between the moment a position becomes under-collateralized and the moment it is successfully liquidated by the protocol. In volatile markets, this latency can be the difference between a solvent protocol and a system-wide collapse.

If the queue is slow, price movements can move past the liquidation threshold, leaving the protocol with bad debt that it cannot recover. High latency is often caused by network congestion, inefficient liquidation bots, or gas price spikes that make transactions too expensive to execute.

Reducing this latency is a primary goal for protocol architects, who use techniques like off-chain price feeds and incentivized liquidation keepers to ensure that liquidations occur as quickly as possible. Minimizing this delay is essential for maintaining the stability of decentralized margin trading.