Ascnt Pools
Market-maker pricing, built into the pool.
A normal pool charges every swap the same flat fee. It can't tell a passive retail swap from an informed trade that is picking it off. A market maker never quotes that way: they widen the spread when it's dangerous, tighten it when it's safe, and skew it to manage what they hold. An Ascnt pool does the same, fully on-chain and with no oracles — every pricing input comes from the pool's own state.
Pricing swaps
Every quote has two parts: a base fee that follows how busy the pool is, and a directional component that follows the pool's imbalance. Each swap is priced individually, from live pool state, at execution time, and clamped between the base fee and a per-pool maximum that is fixed at launch.
The base fee follows activity
When flow is heavy the base fee eases down so the pool wins volume cheaply; when the pool has been quiet it rises, since there's nothing to gain by undercutting with no flow to win. It can't be gamed: it only eases with sustained activity, so the first swap after a quiet spell — the one most likely to pick the pool off a stale price — always pays the full rate.
The surcharge follows imbalance
The pool keeps a running measure of how far recent flow has pushed it out of balance, and in which direction. Before a swap executes, the hook simulates it against live pool state to see what it does to that imbalance. Swaps that push it further out — typically informed or toxic flow — pay progressively more; swaps that push it back trade at a discount, so correcting the pool is the cheapest trade the pool quotes. Because imbalance accumulates across blocks rather than resetting each block, the pricing sees the flow that per-block fee designs miss.
Keeping MEV in the pool
In standard pools, value leaks to arbitrage and MEV — the value bots capture by reordering or inserting transactions around yours. An Ascnt pool is designed so the main extraction vectors are either priced into the fee the pool collects or blocked outright.
Arbitrage is auctioned, not given away
When a large swap moves the price, arbitrageurs step in to pull it back. On a normal pool that profit leaves the pool — the loss LPs take to arbs trading against a stale price is LVR (loss-versus-rebalancing).
An Ascnt pool sells the rebalancing job instead. After a move, the fee on the correcting trade starts high and falls over time like a Dutch auction. Arbitrageurs compete to take the trade as soon as it becomes worthwhile for them, and the fee at that moment stays in the pool. How much of the gap the pool keeps depends on how many arbitrageurs compete, on gas costs, and on market conditions; it is not fixed.
JIT liquidity is locked out
Just-in-time liquidity is a bot adding a large position in the same block as a swap, collecting its fees, and removing it immediately. In its sandwich form, the attacker first front-runs the victim's swap to push the price to a cliff in liquidity, then drops a hyper-concentrated position — often flash-loaned — exactly where that swap will now land. The victim takes heavy price impact and pays its fees into the attacker's range, and the attacker pulls everything in the same block. Ascnt pools close this at the contract level with a JIT block-lock: a freshly added position can't be removed for a lock window set per pool, so it can't be flash-funded and has to carry the price risk it created. The trade no longer closes, which protects swappers from the forced price impact and keeps the fees a swap pays with the positions that were already in the pool.
Sandwiches cost more
A sandwich attack needs two heavy price-impact swaps around the victim's trade. Under imbalance-based pricing, exactly those swaps are the expensive ones — the front-run pays the surcharge on the imbalance it creates and the back-run is priced on that same imbalance — so the round trip costs more the further it pushes the pool.
Rebalancing by design
Pricing the spread is half of a market maker's job. The other half is inventory management: a desk that drifts too far into one asset is carrying risk it isn't paid for, so it skews its quotes to attract the flow that brings its book back. Ascnt builds that lever into the pool.
The swap pricing is skewed by construction: swaps that push the pool further out of balance pay a surcharge, swaps that push it back trade at a discount. Organic flow and competing arbitrageurs do the rebalancing an LP would otherwise pay for, and the auction is designed to keep the value of that correction in the pool. For an LP, the two sides of the P&L are connected: the fee a swap pays scales with the risk it imposes, and the skew is designed to reduce the imbalance that drives divergence loss. It does not remove that loss.
In-pool skew handles the pool's inventory. Managing your position's inventory — range, repositioning, exit — is what the rest of the platform is for: position analytics today, Ascnt Strategies & Vaults next.
The design draws on the market-microstructure literature: adverse-selection pricing (Glosten & Milgrom, 1985), inventory risk (Ho & Stoll, 1981), LVR (Milionis, Moallemi, Roughgarden & Zhang, 2022), directional fees (Nezlobin), and markout-based flow classification. The exact formulas are specified in the public repository.