Generalizing Impermanent Loss on Decentralized Exchanges with Constant Function Market Makers

Abstract: Liquidity providers are essential for the function of decentralized exchanges to ensure liquidity takers can be guaranteed a counterparty for their trades. However, liquidity providers investing in liquidity pools face many risks, the most prominent of which is impermanent loss. Currently, analysis of this metric is difficult to conduct due to different market maker algorithms, fee structures and concentrated liquidity dynamics across the various exchanges. To this end, we provide a framework to generalize impermanent loss for multiple asset pools obeying any constant function market maker with optional concentrated liquidity. We also discuss how pool fees fit into the framework, and identify the condition for which liquidity provisioning becomes profitable when earnings from trading fees exceed impermanent loss. Finally, we demonstrate the utility and generalizability of this framework with simulations in BalancerV2 and UniswapV3.