Risks & disclosures

What can go wrong when you provide liquidity, and what the contracts do and don't guarantee.

Stage of the project

Live on Ethereum mainnet since March 2026, with a limited set of pools while the mechanism is proven on real flow.
Reviewed release live. Deployed on mainnet in September 2026 — addresses in Smart contracts.
New pools may launch with different parameters as we learn from live markets. Each individual pool's parameters, however, are fixed at creation — see below.

General risks of providing liquidity

These apply to any AMM position, on Ascnt or elsewhere.

Divergence loss (impermanent loss). If the price moves from where you entered, you can end up worth less than if you had held the two tokens. Ascnt's fees are designed to help offset this, not eliminate it, and they may not cover it.
Market risk. You are exposed to the price movements of both assets in the pair, and a position's composition drifts toward the asset that is falling.
Range risk. A position only earns fees while the price is inside its range. Out of range it earns nothing and sits entirely in one asset.
No guaranteed yield. Fee income depends on trading volume, which varies with market conditions and can fall to nothing. A dynamic fee is not a fixed return.
Token risk. Each token carries its own contract, issuer, and — for stablecoins and tokenised assets — peg risk. A failure in either token affects the whole position.
Underlying protocol risk. Ascnt pools run on Uniswap v4 and inherit any risk in that protocol.
Residual MEV. Ascnt is designed to recapture and deter MEV but cannot remove all of it.

Risks specific to Ascnt pools

Lock window on withdrawals. After adding liquidity (a top-up included), a position can't be removed until the pool's JIT block-lock passes — two blocks on every current pool, and up to about seven days by the contract's cap. Accrued fees can still be collected during the lock. Plan your exit accordingly.
No kill switch. Nobody — including Ascnt — can halt swaps or withdrawals on a live pool. You can never be frozen in, but a pool with a problem keeps trading until liquidity leaves it.
Pause blocks deposits only. The one emergency lever, pausing new deposits on one hook or on all of them, never touches funds, withdrawals, or swaps. Do not assume a paused pool is inert.

Smart-contract risk

Residual bug risk. Three independent reviews found no path to loss of LP funds, but no review proves the absence of bugs. Accepted, analysed behaviours are documented publicly in the repository's known-issues register.
Governance retains privileged actions — bounded and visible on-chain, listed below.

All authority routes through a single governance registry: a 3-of-4 Safe multisig holds the roles, with sensitive actions routed through a timelock so they are visible on-chain before they take effect.

Action	Who	When it takes effect
Change a pool's fee parameters or lock window	Nobody — set once at creation, immutable	Never; a change means launching a new pool
Protocol fee (capped at 20% of the LP fee, currently off) and treasury	Timelock	After a 7-day delay; the contract enforces a 24-hour minimum
Rotate roles, transfer ownership, retire a hook	Timelock	After the same 7-day delay
Pause new deposits, on one hook or all	Safe multisig	Immediately — cannot move funds, block withdrawals, or change fees
Deploy a hook, flag one deprecated, launch pools	Safe multisig	Immediately

No governance action reaches LP principal. Configuration is immutable, there is no kill switch, and the hook cannot tax an exit.
Ownership can be transferred through the timelock but never renounced, so the protocol can't be bricked.

For the deployed addresses, source code and how to verify a hook, see Smart contracts.

Not financial advice

Nothing in these docs — including any range, probability, or yield figure — is financial advice. Ascnt surfaces market data and on-chain mechanics so you can make your own decisions. All decisions and their outcomes remain yours.