Why providing liquidity isn’t the same as just holding
A constant-product pool automatically rebalances as prices move — selling the asset that’s going up and buying the one that’s going down, to keep the pool’s value constant. That’s great for traders, but it means an LP ends up holding less of whichever asset outperformed, compared to if they’d just held both assets in their wallet.
The formula
IL = 2√k / (1 + k) − 1, where k is the ratio of the new price to the old price. The result is always zero or negative — it’s a measure of underperformance versus holding, not an absolute loss.