Slippage is not a market rule, but a product of DEX design.

Looking at the architecture of most decentralized exchanges, you can understand—liquidity is dispersed across the curve, with uneven density. When users place orders, price fluctuations are not due to sudden market demand changes, but because your trade size encounters liquidity gaps.

For example, if you want to trade a large amount of ETH on a certain DEX, the token pair's liquidity appears sufficient within the depth range. But during execution, the order passes through multiple layers of low liquidity, with each layer being re-priced. This is the true nature of slippage—not the market punishing you, but the protocol design determining how liquidity is laid out.

This also explains why some DEXs have noticeably smaller slippage compared to other platforms—ultimately, it's due to different liquidity deployment strategies. Understanding this allows for more accurate cost prediction during trading.