# Introduction

Automated Market Makers (AMMs) are the cornerstone of DeFi trading - yet their inefficiencies have allowed billions of dollars in value to remain uncaptured. Traditional DEXs rely entirely on these AMMs, which execute trades against open liquidity pools, often at unfavourable rates. Due to price-impact, every buy order executes above market price, and every sell order executes below it. This not only means that traders are losing money both ways - it also leads to significant instability in the price action of most DeFi tokens. Gradient offers an alternative. 

Gradient is a decentralized trading layer built to eliminate price-impact and maximize execution efficiency through real-time, on-chain, off-market trading—prioritizing native Market Maker fills and peer-routed matches before falling back to AMM aggregation, all while deepening token liquidity.

Whether buying or selling, users gain full control over their orders—with the option to be filled instantly, wait for better conditions, or route through AMMs at the best available price. Gradient enables smarter, cheaper, and more customizable trading by shifting execution logic from the pool to the participant.

At the heart of the protocol’s innovation is Gradient’s proprietary Coordinated Order Routing Engine (CORE), a matching system that seeks optimal trade paths across a dynamic liquidity network. This system allows Gradient to simultaneously better conditions for traders while promoting greater liquidity depth and sustainability for tokens being traded.

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