Bancor Network is a decentralized exchange offering unique single-sided liquidity and impermanent loss protection. Learn how it works, how it compares to Uniswap, and whether it's right for your crypto trading strategy.
Single-Sided Liquidity: What It Is, Why It Matters, and Which Crypto Projects Are Using It
When you hear single-sided liquidity, a way to provide crypto liquidity without pairing it with another token. Also known as unilateral liquidity, it lets you deposit just one asset—like ETH or SOL—into a pool instead of matching it with a second token like USDC. This sounds simple, but it changes how decentralized exchanges manage risk, rewards, and user access. Most DeFi platforms still use the old model: you put in 50% ETH and 50% USDC to create a trading pair. That’s called liquidity provision, the standard method of supplying paired assets to enable trading on decentralized exchanges. But single-sided liquidity skips the pairing. It’s used by newer protocols trying to lower the barrier for small investors who don’t want to hold two tokens or worry about impermanent loss.
Why does this matter? Because most crypto projects with low liquidity, insufficient trading volume to support smooth buying and selling. are either scams or experiments. Projects like Elk Finance on Avalanche or Core Dao Swap have near-zero trading volume, and their liquidity pools are tiny. Single-sided liquidity sounds great on paper—you deposit your token, earn rewards, no need for a partner token. But in practice, if nobody else is trading that token, your reward comes from a pool that’s barely moving. That’s why you’ll see posts here about WagyuSwap’s dead airdrop, 1BCH.com’s ghost exchange, and FreiExchange’s zero-fee trap. These aren’t failures because they’re new—they’re failures because they rely on single-sided liquidity without real demand.
Single-sided liquidity isn’t bad by design. It’s a tool. It works best when the token has real use, like Mintlayer’s native Bitcoin DeFi layer or Aleo’s privacy-focused chain. But when a project uses it to hide the fact that no one wants to trade their token? That’s where the risk kicks in. You’re not providing liquidity—you’re funding a ghost town. The AMM, automated market maker, the algorithm that sets prices without order books. behind these pools can’t work if no one’s trading. And if the price can’t move, your rewards vanish. That’s why the posts below don’t just list projects—they expose the gap between marketing and reality. You’ll find reviews of exchanges with zero users, airdrops that ended years ago, and tokens with no trading volume. All of them tie back to one thing: single-sided liquidity used as a bandage for a deeper problem.