You know what I mean every swap service nowadays is passing through your hands even when the markets are pretty still. A big part of it is how each platform acquires its liquidity and determines its price some of the smaller bridges or liquidity pools can have significantly different prices and hidden protocol fees, in addition to the fee on the network itself. When the sites advertise instant trades they are only implying that the transaction will be broadcast quickly but the trade may be in a queue or working round through various pools before the transaction is represented as complete. I have seen that a good onchain aggregator can be very useful recently since it discovers the optimal path through tens of pools on the fly. I commonly rely on services that will allow me to compare quotes directly onchain such as oneinch or matcha whilst also monitoring the estimated tolerance of slippage. Later in 2025 I have been trying out some under the radar stuff such as liquidity aggregators on layer two networks or cross chain routers where batched auctioning is used to mitigate sandwich attacks and frontrunning


Timing never ceases to be important but the greatest shock is when the platform itself will also add unaccounted margin. Want something simple and transparent? Try a reputable aggregator and post your own slippage limits onchain. That way, you are able to detect each hop your trade is taking and the cost each protocol is charging. It is a bit more work but in the long run avoids headaches and lost value.