IL.wtf: New Site Exposes Impermanent Loss Across Your Uniswap & Sushiswap Pools

DeFi’s dirty little secret is spilling out into the open. Impermanent loss affects nearly every DeFi yield farmer who has ever staked their tokens in a decentralized exchange like Uniswap or Sushiswap, and it’s a similar story playing out in DEXs across every major blockchain.

You want to make money on the tokens you own, so you stake the tokens inside a liquidity pool like Uniswap, Sushiswap, Pancakeswap or any food-themed swap. Your money facilitates trading and generates fees from traders.

Your tokens may go up or down in price, and that volatility encourages trading which generates fees. But it’s that same volatility that can incur massive value loss in your holdings. Because as your tokens move in price, they can be automatically sold at a discount or bought at an inflated price.

The result is you can lose money instead of earning. It’s called “Impermanent Loss”, but more often than not it is permanent. We know it’s an awkward name, but welcome to crypto.

IL.wtf, a new tool built by APY.Vision and Bancor, allows users to see how much IL they’ve suffered when providing liquidity, and which pools have burned them the most. Released this week, IL.wtf tracks historic and current liquidity positions in Uniswap V2, Sushiswap, Balancer V1 and V2, Kyber and 1inch to calculate how much IL you have suffered over time. 

IL.wtf calculates IL by comparing the value of your tokens in a liquidity pool (including fees collected) to the value of those tokens if you had simply held them in your wallet. Unsurprisingly,  the data has made for grim reading for most LPs so far, including well-known Twitter influencers…

I provided liquidity to 10 pools and i accrued $20,028.66 in impermanent loss. I’m pretty sure this is missing quite a few pools as well.https://t.co/tvPXRy8Dfi #BancorBailouts

— A dying Nobody's best fren (@0xPoopster) November 14, 2021

I provided liquidity to 80 pools and lost $11,138.31 in impermanent loss. Count your losses and get bailed out https://t.co/3U3Zt3j3v5 #BancorBailouts

— tomuky.eth ⟠ (@tomuky) November 13, 2021

https://twitter.com/dnkta/status/1459509031446495241

I provided liquidity to 9 pools and lost $20,602.33 in impermanent loss. Count your losses and get bailed out https://t.co/h2M74i2zK5 #BancorBailouts

— KHR (@KaHHaRiaN) November 12, 2021

Down bad

I provided liquidity to 16 pools and lost $14,683.17 in impermanent loss. https://t.co/wf0hJ6n8QH #BancorBailouts

— Dave Craige (@davecraige) November 13, 2021

I provided liquidity to 18 pools and lost $158,407.47 in impermanent loss. Count your losses and get bailed out https://t.co/ilBeykD2ns #BancorBailouts

— lesigh (@lesigh3100) November 13, 2021

If you haven’t yet checked your IL, follow these steps for your chance to receive a $1,000 bailout in the form of BNT:

1) Enter your wallet address into IL.wtf

2) Click “Share” to tweet your IL (sharing your IL will NOT expose your wallet address) keeping the hashtag #BancorBailouts. 

Every day, Monday through Friday, Bancor will randomly select a rekt LP who has shared their IL on Twitter to receive a $1,000 #BancorBailout. If your tweet is chosen as a winner, your $1000 #BancorBailout will be sent to the wallet that suffered the IL.

To date, Bancor is the only AMM where LPs can “stake and forget” their tokens with full protection from impermanent loss via Bancor Safe Staking. Bancor has therefore become the most profitable AMM for liquidity providers as measured by protocol revenue. The graphic below shows how full impermanent loss protection benefits Bancor LPs over LPs on other AMMs:

https://twitter.com/Bancor/status/1450391438311702531

To learn more about Bancor Safe Staking, visit: earn.bancor.network/safe-staking.