LP education · the flagship metric
One ratio that tells you whether providing liquidity is outperforming simply holding the two tokens — measured at the current mark.
TL;DR
Cover Value = total fees earned ÷ |impermanent loss vs HODL|, at the current mark.
Above 1× — fees are beating IL: you're net ahead of just holding the tokens. Exactly 1× — fees precisely cover the loss: break-even vs HODL. Below 1× — fees haven't caught up yet; QuantumPools shows this as a negative multiple (e.g. −3.85×), meaning fees would need to be 3.85× as large to cover.
Everything here is unrealized — both numbers move with price until you withdraw or rebalance.
Why this metric exists
Every LP position pays you fees. Fees look like pure income — a number that only goes up. But providing liquidity has an invisible cost: impermanent loss, the gap between what your position is worth now and what the tokens you originally deposited would be worth if you had simply held them.
So the honest question is never "how much did I earn in fees?" It's: did the fees outrun the IL? Cover Value is exactly that — the ratio of the two, in dollars, right now.
The math
The denominator only counts the loss side. If your position is currently worth more than holding (an IL gain — it happens), the loss is 0, not negative. There's nothing for fees to cover.
And there's a floor: an IL loss under $0.005 — half a cent — counts as zero. Dividing fees by half a cent of price noise would produce a giant, meaningless ratio, so QuantumPools doesn't compute one. That epsilon gives the metric four possible states:
| State | When | Shown as | Meaning |
|---|---|---|---|
| pending | fees or IL still unknown (no entry basis yet) | pending | We won't guess — the ratio waits until the original deposit is known. |
| uncapped | IL loss < $0.005 and fees > 0 | no IL | Fees exist with effectively zero IL loss — fees fully cover, no loss vs hold. |
| none | IL loss < $0.005 and fees ≤ 0 | — | No fees and no loss yet. Nothing to measure. |
| ok | IL loss ≥ $0.005 | F / loss, as 2.40× or −3.85× | The real ratio — green at 1× and above, red below. |
Diagram · reading the number
Think of cover as a gauge from 0× to 3×+. Everything left of 1× means fees are behind; the gold line at 1× is break-even vs HODL; everything right of it means fees are winning.
How QuantumPools shows it
A cover of 0.26 is technically correct but hard to feel. QuantumPools never shows a cover below 1× as a decimal fraction. Instead it shows the negated reciprocal:
So a cover of 0.26 renders as −3.85× — read as "fees would need to be 3.85× as large to cover the IL". You are 3.85× short. It is not a negative ratio; it's a shortfall multiple, styled red. Ratios at 1× and above render as themselves, styled green.
| True ratio (F ÷ |IL|) | What the tile shows |
|---|---|
| 0.10 | −10.00× |
| 0.26 | −3.85× |
| 0.50 | −2.00× |
| 1.00 | 1.00× |
| 1.80 | 1.80× |
| 4.20 | 4.20× |
Formatting details: magnitudes of 100 and above round to whole numbers with commas; below 100, two decimals. A cover of zero or less, or a non-finite value, shows "—". Fees with an IL loss under $0.005 show the literal string no IL — that's the uncapped state, not an error and not infinity: the denominator is simply ~zero.
The dollar figure beside it. On position cards, Metrics and the totals, the headline is the signed net in dollars: fees earned + impermanent loss (fees − |IL loss|). It is red when fees have not yet covered the IL and green when they have, for example −$170.10 · −1.51× or +$92.79 · 4.15×. The multiple next to it follows the rule above. The two always agree in sign: net below $0 means cover below 1×, which is shown negative.
Diagram · the race over time
Fees accumulate steadily — they only go up. IL breathes with price: it grows as the pair diverges and shrinks if price comes back. Cover is the running score of that race.
Worked example
You deposit two tokens worth $1,000 total into a v3-style pool.
Fees are 52% ahead of the loss. LPing beat holding this month.
Fees would need to be 1.66× as large to cover the IL. You'd have been better off holding — so far.
Where the denominator comes from
Cover is only as honest as its IL figure, and IL is only as honest as the entry basis — what you actually deposited. QuantumPools reconstructs that original deposit from the position's own on-chain history (the "Genesis Machine"), so Cover Value and IL are chain-exact with no manual step.
Two details matter a lot here:
1. Reinvested fees are stripped back out. When the keeper auto-compounds, earned fees sit inside your current balance. Comparing that straight to HODL nets earnings against the loss — a position could report no impermanent loss while having given up most of its principal. So compounded fees are removed at current prices before the HODL comparison. They can't mask IL, and they aren't double-counted as earnings.
2. Missing ≠ zero. Until a genesis basis exists, cover shows pending — QuantumPools never invents entry balances. A single-sided deposit (a mint entirely in one token) keeps its genuinely-zero leg; back-filling it with current holdings would inflate the HODL benchmark and overstate IL. And a tick-snapshot fallback stamped after a rebalance spans hours, not the position's life — which is why the chain-reconstructed basis, not the tick math, is the real method.
Using it
Position triage. Sort your book by cover. A position sitting deep below 1× for weeks is telling you its fee tier doesn't pay for its volatility — a candidate to close, narrow, or rebalance. A position holding 2×+ is earning its keep.
Comparing fee tiers and pairs. Two pools of the same pair at different fee tiers, or a stable pair vs a volatile one — cover puts them on the same scale: fee income per dollar of divergence cost.
Judging the whole book. The aggregate cover across all positions is ΣF ÷ Σ|IL loss| — total fees over total losses. It is deliberately not the average of per-position ratios (one tiny position at 40× would drown the number), and IL gains contribute zero to the denominator — they never offset another position's loss. Closed and burned positions are excluded, since a burned position's last-seen numbers would sit in the denominator forever.
One platform caveat: on Solana positions cover shows "—" with a note — there's no genesis-basis equivalent there yet, so it's stated as unavailable rather than left eternally pending.
Limits
It's not APR. Cover has no time axis — 1.5× after a week and 1.5× after a year are very different investments. Use it alongside yield metrics, not instead of them.
It's not realized profit. Everything is marked to the current price. IL is unrealized until you withdraw or rebalance — price can come back (that's the "impermanent" part) or keep going. Realized cover, locked in at each rebalance and withdrawal, is a separate figure — coming later to QuantumPools.
It's not predictive. Both the numerator and the denominator move. Fees only rise; IL can double overnight or vanish. A 3× cover today is a snapshot, not a promise — nothing on this page is a forecast of returns.
Try it
Enter your total fees earned and your current IL loss vs HODL (both in USD). The static examples above tell the same story if this widget doesn't load.
Uses the product's exact rules: losses under $0.005 count as zero ("no IL" when fees exist), and covers below 1× display as the negated reciprocal.
Educational content, not financial advice. LP positions can lose value; nothing here promises returns.