Using LumosCore
Liquidity pools
Adding and withdrawing liquidity, creating a pool, and the risks of providing it.
A liquidity pool holds a reserve of two assets and quotes a price between them from the ratio of those reserves. Anyone can deposit into one, and depositors earn a share of the fees that traders pay to swap through it.
#Depositing
- Open Pools and choose a pool, or find it by its pair.
- Enter an amount. You deposit both assets, in the ratio the pool currently holds — enter one side and the other is calculated.
- Approve in your wallet. You receive pool shares representing your portion of the reserves.
Your positions appear under My Positions on the Pools page, with the current value of each.
#Withdrawing
Withdraw any part of a position at any time. There is no lock-up, no cooldown and no withdrawal queue: you burn pool shares and the underlying assets return to your account in the same transaction.
#Creating a pool
If no pool exists for a pair, you can create one. You set the initial deposit, and that deposit sets the pool's opening price — the ratio you choose is the exchange rate until someone trades against it.
Check the ratio twice
Creating a pool at a price far from the real market is an open invitation: the first trader will arbitrage it back and the difference comes out of your deposit. Look up the market rate first.
Creating a pool needs a trustline to the pool share asset as well as to both assets in the pair, and each of those reserves XLM in your account. If the create step fails, an XLM shortage is the usual reason.
#What you earn
Stellar's pools charge 0.3% on every swap routed through them, paid to the pool's depositors in proportion to their share. It accrues into the reserves rather than being paid out separately, so your position grows in value instead of producing a claimable balance.
Some pools also pay LUMOS through the reward programmes — see Rewards for which ones and how the rounds work.
#The risk that catches people out
Divergence loss — often called impermanent loss — is the cost of a pool rebalancing as the price moves. When one asset rises against the other, the pool sells some of the riser to whoever is trading. You end up holding more of the asset that fell and less of the one that rose, and your position can be worth less than if you had simply held both assets in your wallet.
Fee income offsets it, and on a stable pair it usually more than offsets it. On a volatile pair it may not. The loss becomes real when you withdraw, which is why "impermanent" is a misleading name for it.
You are exposed to both assets
A pool cannot protect you from either side of the pair. If one asset in the pool fails or its issuer stops honouring it, the pool absorbs that — and so does your position. Rewards do not indemnify you against it.
Last updated 29 August 2026