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-committed quotes a fork can't replay are excluded here, so a routing choice is never miscounted as a reliability failure. Realized cost (bps) is the median shortfall of what actually filled versus what was quoted (fee + MEV + slippage + gas), for the quotes that landed.
Two characters frame the field. Odos posts among the cheapest fills of any aggregator here — around 0.2 bps median — yet roughly one in five of its quotes fails to realize in simulation, reaching 26.2% at $1k. Its routes are all on-chain, so this is genuine: a quote you can't rely on settling isn't cheap. OpenOcean is the mirror image — it almost never fails (0.6%) but charges for it, an 11.4 bps median fill, roughly 50× the cheapest routers. Meanwhile Uniswap's direct route and ParaSwap quietly clear nearly every quote at near-zero cost.
The point isn't a winner. It's that 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. That's 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-committed and non-simulatable
routes are excluded from that axis, 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 (too few samples) are excluded from the chart. Every figure traces to
seed/quote_samples.csv in the ClearTrace repo.
Regenerate: groupby(source, size_cohort) on
seed/quote_samples.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.
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