Slippage and Buffer

Execution risk is one of the primary sources of hidden cost in portfolio management. Orion addresses this risk not only at the level of individual trades, but at the level of the system as a whole. Slippage controls and execution buffers are part of a broader framework designed to manage counterparty risk, preserve capital efficiency, and minimize market impact across multiple vaults.

Slippage as a Risk Control Mechanism

In Orion, slippage is treated as a hard risk constraint: for every trade derived from an intent, the system atomically compares the expected execution outcome with the actual amount required or received at execution time. If the deviation exceeds the configured tolerance, execution reverts entirely.

This ensures that the vault never unknowingly accepts worse-than-expected prices due to liquidity fragmentation, adverse selection, or sudden market movement.

Buffers and Deterministic Execution

In practice, the prices used to plan a rebalance and the prices encountered during execution are never perfectly identical.

Orion computes portfolio targets using oracle-based price adapters, while execution interacts with live protocol state. Execution buffers exist to absorb this inevitable mismatch between planning prices and execution prices.

Capital Efficiency Through Netting

A key advantage of Orion's architecture emerges when multiple vaults submit intents concurrently.

Rather than executing each vault's trades in isolation, Orion can net buy and sell flows across vaults at the system level before touching external liquidity. Internal netting reduces the amount of capital that must be moved onchain and minimizes exposure to external execution venues.

This improves capital efficiency while preserving strict intent fidelity for each vault.

When opposing flows cancel internally, fewer assets need to be bought or sold externally. This lowers price impact and reduces the slippage pressure associated with each vault rebalancing independently.