A DEX aggregator shows you one number: the quote. ClearTrace's fork-simulation sampler requests the same trade from every aggregator and measures what happens next. Two things erode a quote before the tokens reach your wallet. The route can revert, or it can fill worse than quoted. The cheapest-looking quote is often neither.
Each line is one aggregator across four order sizes on Ethereum. Switch the metric, rebase to an indexed view to compare trajectories, click a legend chip to isolate a series, or go fullscreen. Everything hovers.
Quote fails to realize (%) is the share of fork-verifiable quotes whose execution reverted when ClearTrace replayed it against a mainnet fork: the route the aggregator quoted failed to settle. 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. Off-chain RFQ routing (%) is the share of quotes filled through off-chain RFQ desks instead of on-chain AMMs.
Three characters emerge. Odos posts among the cheapest fills of any aggregator here, at a near-zero median cost, yet roughly one in seven of its quotes fails to realize in simulation overall (14.5%), and nearly one in five at $1k (19.8%). Its routes are all on-chain, so this is genuine: a quote you can't rely on settling isn't cheap. KyberSwap tells a routing story instead. By $1M it sends 86% of flow through off-chain RFQ makers, where essentially no other aggregator routes. That is why it's read on the RFQ axis, not by simulated failures; its actual on-chain revert rate stays low. OpenOcean almost never fails (0.4%) but charges for it, at an 11.5 bps median fill, an order of magnitude above the near-zero-cost routers. Meanwhile Uniswap's direct route and ParaSwap quietly clear nearly every quote at near-zero cost.
No aggregator wins outright, and that is the finding: no single number, least of all the quote, ranks an aggregator. Reliability, fill quality, routing topology, and how each moves with size are different questions, and the best answer changes with the trade. This is the layer ClearTrace measures that a quote screen can't show you.
Sampler window , Ethereum,
token pairs, quote samples across four
size cohorts ($1k / $10k / $100k / $1M). Realized cost is the median all-in basis-point shortfall
versus the quoted output for successfully simulated fills. "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. SushiSwap (overlaps the reliable-cheap cluster exactly),
OKX (began returning fillable quotes only mid-window, from 2026-07-10, so it
lacks full-window coverage) and LI.FI (began mid-window, too few full-window samples) are excluded from the chart. Every figure traces to the
pinned snapshot research_drafts/snapshots/quote_samples_2026-07-20.csv: a frozen copy of the ClearTrace repo's live sampler output, pinned 2026-07-20 so every number stays reproducible even as the live seed/quote_samples.csv keeps growing.
Regenerate: groupby(source, size_cohort) on
research_drafts/snapshots/quote_samples_2026-07-20.csv. Fails % = mean(reverted==1) over
fork-verifiable rows (rfq_routed!=True & sim_unsupported!=True); realized cost =
median(all_in_cost_bps) over ok==1; RFQ % =
mean(rfq_routed==True) over returned quotes.
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