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Liquidity, price impact and market cap
A token’s price is what its pool pays for a small trade. Liquidity says how large a trade can get before that price moves. For anyone who means to sell one day, it matters more than the price.
3 min readUpdated Oct 12, 2026
In short
- $1,000 sold into an $8,000 pool returns about $800.
- The same sale into an $800,000 pool returns about $997.
- Market cap is not money that can be taken out.
What liquidity is
On PulseChain most trading happens in pools. A pool holds two tokens, and anyone can swap one for the other. The price is the ratio between the two sides.
Liquidity is the value of what the pools hold, both sides counted. It is the depth of the market, and it says how much can be traded before the price gives way.
One trade, two pools
Take a pool holding $8,000: $4,000 of a token and $4,000 of PLS. Sell $1,000 of the token into it. You receive about $800 of PLS, and the token’s price ends 36% lower than it began.
Now the same trade into a pool holding $800,000. You receive about $997, and the price barely moves.
The quoted price was the same in both pools. Only the depth was different. Both figures are before the exchange’s own fee.
The pool holds $8,000
You sell $1,000
- You receive
- $800
- Lost to price impact
- 20%
- The price ends
- 36% lower
Too thin. A large part of this trade is given to the pool.
A pool with half its value on each side, before the exchange’s own fee.
Why a thin pool misleads
In a small pool one small trade moves the price by several percent. A token can show a rise of 40% in a day because one person bought $500 of it.
That is why this site leaves pools under $25,000 out of its list of movers. And an almost empty pool can print any price at all: one token’s first day once read $1.68 trillion against seven dollars of liquidity.
Market cap and FDV
- Market capThe price multiplied by the tokens in circulation.
- FDVFully diluted valuation: the price multiplied by every token that will ever exist. On a new token the gap between the two is often the whole story.
- Neither is moneyBoth multiply the price of a small trade by a very large number. What holders could take out together is bounded by the liquidity, not by the cap.
Before you buy
- Your trade against the pool
- A trade worth half a percent of the pool’s liquidity costs about one percent in price. Ten times that costs about nine.
- Whether it trades
- A pool with depth and no trades has a price nobody has tested today.
- Who can remove it
- Liquidity belongs to whoever supplied it. Unless it is locked or burned, it can be withdrawn.
- The exchange’s own estimate
- Every exchange shows the price impact before you confirm. Read it each time.
How this site shows it
A token’s price comes from its deepest pool. Its liquidity is added up across its pools, up to the thirty deepest, so for a widely traded token the figure is a floor and not a total.
How every figure is measuredSources
Questions people ask
It depends on the size of your trade. As a rule of thumb, a trade worth half a percent of the pool’s liquidity moves the price about one percent. A pool is deep enough when your trade is small beside it.
How far your own trade moves the price. It grows with the size of the trade against the pool. It is separate from the exchange’s fee and is paid on top of it.
The difference between the price you were quoted and the price you got, because the pool moved in between. The slippage setting is the most you agree to lose that way before the swap is cancelled.
No. Market cap is a price multiplied by a supply. A token can show a large cap over a pool of a few thousand dollars, and then very little of that cap can be sold.
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