The Gas Floor

Why every pool quotes one price — until gas says otherwise.  An on-chain measurement, 2026-08-23, refreshed nightly below.

The Question

A token like eHEX trades in dozens of pools at once — fifty-two on PulseChain alone, fourteen more on Ethereum, against different partners, on different venues, at different depths.  A reasonable person asks: with the price scattered across that many venues, how can there be one price?  Does the number of pools move it?  Does where the liquidity sits?

The textbook answer is arbitrage: any pool that drifts from the others is a free trade, someone takes it, and the drift closes.  But the textbook answer has a quiet condition attached, and the condition turns out to be measurable.

The Measurement

On 2026-08-23 we read every discoverable HEX and eHEX pool on both chains and compared prices within partner families — every eHEX/WPLS pool against every other eHEX/WPLS pool, every eHEX/HEX pool against its siblings — so no dollar conversion touches the measure.  A pool’s deviation from its family’s reserve-weighted mean is a pure reading of how well arbitrage is doing its job.

The result on the deep pools was emphatic: every pool with real depth quoted the same price.  On PulseChain, every meaningful pool sat within half a percent of its family — the deepest eHEX/WPLS pool at ±0.00%, and even a pool holding under a thousand dollars held to −0.50%.  On Ethereum the real pools agreed within ±0.35%.  Fifty pools, one price.  The count does not move the level; pool count is a symptom of where the demand lives, not a cause of what the price is.

The Tail — and the Law

The interesting part is the pools that disagreed.  One eHEX/HEX pool on a minor PulseChain venue sat 19–21% adrift of its family.  On Ethereum, a pool worth about ^$2,400 drifted −3.7%, and the dust pools — a few thousand eHEX or less — were stranded at +1,240% to +5,005%: not markets anymore, just abandoned price markers.

The pattern behind every straggler is the same, and it is the law this page is named for.  Arbitrage corrects a pool only while the correction pays more than the gas it costs.  That threshold is the gas floor.  On PulseChain, where a swap costs a fraction of a cent, even sub-^$1,000 pools stay arbed to half a percent.  On Ethereum, where a swap costs dollars, any pool below a few thousand dollars is not worth correcting — so it drifts, and keeps drifting, and its quote decays from a price into a relic.

Cheap gas does not just make trading cheap.  It makes every pool’s price honest.  A chain’s price web is only as tight as its gas is low.

Where eHEX Actually Trades

The same sweep measured where eHEX’s liquidity lives, and the answer surprises people: roughly three-quarters of all pooled eHEX trades on PulseChain — as the bridged twin — against one quarter on Ethereum, the chain it was issued on.  Price discovery follows liquidity, so eHEX’s price is now effectively made on a chain it never launched on, while the thin home-chain pools follow along.  About 2% of each token’s liquid supply is working in pools at all (see % of Liquid in LPs); the rest rests in wallets — and that is after staking has locked away over 90% of everything allocated.

The Straggler Board

Below is the live board: every pool the nightly sweep can read that sits more than 1% from its family’s price.  (Coverage is honest, not total: the sweep’s discovery source lists up to 30 pools per token per chain side, so a straggler ranked past that cap waits until churn surfaces it.)  Publishing them helps them get found — and that makes this a self-emptying page: any pool whose correction is genuinely profitable should vanish from the board shortly after appearing on it, which is the market working in public.

One honesty line before the table: the estimate column is the small-drift approximation (pool value × deviation² ÷ 8) and it ignores gas — deliberately, because gas is the whole point.  Most stragglers sit on this board precisely because closing them pays less than the gas it would cost; that is the gas floor doing its work in plain sight.  Nothing here is advice — the board states what the chain says, and people will do what they do.

*Small-drift approximation, before gas.  Method and full per-family data: pool-dispersion.json.

Why It Matters Here

For HTT markets the lesson runs in Actuator’s favor.  HTT pools live on PulseChain, below which the gas floor barely exists — so even a modest maturity’s pool stays honestly priced, and its quote can be trusted even where it cannot absorb size.  The distinction the Manual’s liquidity chapter draws between a pool’s depth (how much size it absorbs) and its honesty (whether its quote is the market) is exactly the distinction this measurement makes visible.  Definitions: Gas Floor in the glossary.