Deeper: a Shared Liquidity DEX Design for Low Trading Volume Tokens to
Enhance Average Liquidity
Abstract
This paper presents Deeper, a design for a decentralized exchange that
enhances liquidity via reserve sharing. By doing this, it addresses the
problem of shallow liquidity in low trading volume token pairs. Shallow
liquidity impairs the functioning of on-chain markets by creating room
for unwanted phenomena such as high slippage and sandwich attacks.
Deeper solves this by allowing liquidity providers of multiple trading
pairs against a common token to share liquidity. This is achieved by
creating a common reserve pool for the shared token that is accessible
by each trading pair. Independent from the shared liquidity, providers
are free to add liquidity to individual token pairs without any
restriction. The trading between one token pair does not affect the
price of other token pairs even though the reserve of the shared token
changes. The proposed design is an extension of concentrated liquidity
automated market maker DEXs that is simple enough to be implemented on
smart contracts. This is demonstrated by providing a template for a
hook-based smart contract that adds our custom functionality to Uniswap
V4. Experiments on historical prices show that for a batch consisting of
8 trading pairs, Deeper enhances liquidity by over 2.6–5.9×. The
enhancement in liquidity can be increased further by increasing the
participating tokens in the shared pool. While providing shared
liquidity, Liquidity Providers should be cautious of certain risks and
pitfalls, which are described. Overall, Deeper enables the creation of
fair markets for low trading volume token pairs.