ClearTrace · Execution Quality · Base · Interactive

What execution quality costs you on Base

ClearTrace's fork-simulation sampler requests the same trade from nine DEX aggregators on Base and measures what happens next. The headline is good news: most venues fill within a basis point of their quote, and failures are rare. But not all of them — and the exceptions are exactly what a quote screen won't show you.

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Each line is one aggregator across three order sizes on Base. Switch the metric, rebase to an indexed view to compare trajectories, click a legend chip to isolate a series, or go fullscreen. Everything hovers.

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How to read it

Quote fails to realize (%) is the share of fork-verifiable quotes whose execution reverted when ClearTrace replayed it against a Base fork: the route the aggregator quoted failed to settle. Requests that returned no quote at all stay in that denominator and cannot fail in simulation, so a venue with a high no-quote rate reads slightly more reliable than its returned quotes alone would — OpenOcean, the only venue where this matters, is 1.3% over returned quotes versus the 0.9% shown. Off-chain RFQ quotes are excluded here: a fork can't replay a market maker's off-chain commitment, so counting those as failures would confuse routing with reliability. Realized cost (bps) is the median shortfall of what actually filled versus what was quoted (fee + MEV + slippage + gas), for the quotes that landed. On Base, gas inside that figure is priced as L2 execution only and excludes the L1 data fee, so every cost number on this page is a lower bound. Off-chain RFQ routing (%) is the share of quotes filled through off-chain RFQ desks instead of on-chain AMMs.

Three characters emerge. LI.FI posts a near-zero median cost (0.27 bps), but its reliability degrades with size: 12.1% of its $100k quotes fail to realize in simulation, up from 3.0% at $1k. Its Base routes are on-chain, so this is genuine: a cheap quote you can't settle at size isn't cheap. OpenOcean is the opposite trade-off, twice over. Its median fill costs 10.0 bps — essentially its disclosed routing fee (OpenOcean charges 10 bps on volatile pairs, 1 bp on stables), not hidden slippage — an order of magnitude above the near-zero-cost routers and nearly five times the next-priciest venue. And before cost even enters, 28.9% of its quote requests returned no quote at all, by far the highest no-quote rate in the set. KyberSwap tells a routing story: it is the only aggregator doing any off-chain RFQ routing on Base, reaching 7.5% of its $100k flow. Those legs read on the RFQ axis, never as failures. Meanwhile Uniswap's direct route, 1inch, ParaSwap, SushiSwap, and Bebop all quietly clear nearly every quote at (near-)zero to one basis point.

The cross-chain contrast is the quieter finding. On Ethereum, the same sampler methodology finds overall failure rates up to 14.5% (19.8% in the worst single cohort) and RFQ routing up to 86% of $1M flow (the Ethereum edition). On Base the whole field is tighter: seven of nine venues fill at a median of about one basis point or less, and no venue's overall failure rate exceeds LI.FI's 6.5%. One caveat cuts the other way: the sampler does not run a $1M cohort on Base, and on Ethereum it is exactly the $1M cohort where several venues degrade — so "tight at $100k" should not be extrapolated to institutional size.

What this is and isn't. These figures come from ClearTrace's controlled quote sampler: the identical trade requested from each aggregator API and replayed against a Base fork from a single fixed taker, so no address-rotating solver bots inflate the counts. "Fails to realize" is a fork-simulation reliability signal for on-chain routes, not a live on-chain user-revert rate. The two answer different questions. This sampler asks whether the quoted route settles exactly as offered; a genuine user's front-end retries and re-quotes, so the rate they actually experience is lower. Read LI.FI's 12.1% at $100k as a test of the quoted route, not as the rate a trader lives with. Off-chain RFQ routes can't be fork-verified and are reported on their own axis, never as failures.

Methodology & sources

Sampler window , Base, token pairs (WETH/USDC, WETH/USDT, cbBTC/USDC, USDC/USDT), quote samples across three size cohorts ($1k / $10k / $100k; the sampler does not run a $1M cohort on Base). Realized cost is the median all-in basis-point shortfall versus the quoted output for successfully simulated fills; gas in that figure is valued as L2 execution only, excluding the L1 data fee, so all-in costs here are lower bounds. "Fails to realize" counts reverted simulations over fork-verifiable quotes only; off-chain RFQ and non-simulatable routes are excluded from that axis and reported separately as RFQ routing share, because a fork cannot adjudicate an off-chain commitment. All nine venues have full-window coverage on Base; none are excluded. Every figure traces to the pinned snapshot research_drafts/snapshots/quote_samples_base_2026-08-28.csv: a frozen, Base-only copy of the ClearTrace repo's live sampler output, pinned 2026-08-28 so every number stays reproducible even as the live seed/quote_samples.csv keeps growing.

Reviewer verification: every plotted number, traced to source

Regenerate: groupby(source, size_cohort) on research_drafts/snapshots/quote_samples_base_2026-08-28.csv. Fails % = mean(reverted==1) over fork-verifiable rows (rfq_routed!=True & sim_unsupported!=True, including rows where no quote came back); realized cost = median(all_in_cost_bps) over ok==1; RFQ % = mean(rfq_routed==True) over sampled rows.

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