Slippage Propagation
Slippage propagation describes how a large trade on one exchange creates a price shift that ripples across other venues through arbitrageurs. When a trade causes a price to move significantly on a primary exchange, arbitrage bots immediately execute trades on other platforms to capture the price difference.
This spreads the initial slippage to the entire market, effectively magnifying the impact of the original trade. In crypto, where arbitrage is highly efficient but liquidity is fragmented, this phenomenon is very common.
It demonstrates how interconnected the global crypto market is and why large trades must be executed carefully using advanced order types. Failure to account for propagation can result in significantly worse execution prices than anticipated.