Grid

9. Grid strategy to configure a grid and read its economics.

A grid buys a token every time its price drops to one of your price lines and sells it again when the price rises to the next line up, over and over, inside a band you choose. It makes money from price chopping, not from price direction. If the price leaves the band, the grid pauses and waits.

What it is and when to use it

You pick a token, a lower price, an upper price and a number of grids. Surge slices the band into equal steps. Each step is a rung: it buys at its lower line and sells at its upper line. Every completed buy-then-sell (or sell-then-buy) is one cycle, and the difference between the two lines minus fees is that cycle's profit. After a cycle closes the rung re-arms and waits to do it again.

Use a grid when you expect a token to oscillate within a range for days or weeks. Do not use it when you expect a sustained trend: in an uptrend the grid sells its inventory early and then sits out of range; in a downtrend it buys all the way down and holds tokens at a loss.

A grid never finishes on its own. It runs until you stop it.

How it works

Lines and rungs. With a lower price L, an upper price U and N grids, Surge places N+1 lines at equal price intervals from L to U. Rung i buys at line i and sells at line i+1. Because the intervals are equal in price, the percentage gap is widest at the bottom rung and narrowest at the top — so the top rung is always the least profitable one, and it is the one every feasibility check is measured against.

Sizing. Each rung gets the same ADA budget: total investment ÷ number of grids.

Starting position. When you create the grid, rungs whose buy line is above the current price start armed to sell — they expect to be funded with tokens, not ADA. Rungs below the current price start armed to buy with ADA. The builder's Required balance panel tells you how many tokens and how much ADA that split needs.

What triggers a trade. Surge watches the reference pool (the deepest eligible pool for the pair, on the DEXes you allowed). Each time its price ticks:

• a rung armed to buy fires when the price is at or below its buy line;

• a rung armed to sell fires when the price is at or above its sell line.

One order at a time. Crossed rungs are queued, never fired together. A grid fires at most one order every two minutes, nearest-to-current-price first, because two orders from the same wallet in quick succession collide on chain. Each rung also has a two-minute cooldown after it detects a crossing. Just before an order is built, the price is re-checked at current reserves; if the rung is no longer crossed it is re-armed without trading.

Minimum received. Every order carries a floor of expected output × (1 − slippage tolerance), with the tolerance clamped to 0.1%–5%. The expected output is quoted when the order is built, which can be up to two minutes after the crossing, so a fill can be worse than the line by the price move in that window plus your slippage tolerance.

After a fill. A filled buy flips the rung to sell-armed and records the exact number of tokens received; the matching sell is sized on exactly that lot, so inventory never drifts. A filled sell flips the rung back to buy-armed. A refund re-arms the same side with the same lot.

Circuit breaker. If a single price tick crosses more than 3 lines at once, or more than 5 lines are crossed within one two-minute window, the grid trips to Paused — circuit breaker and drops everything queued. This catches depegs, feed glitches and fat-finger prices. It does not clear itself; you resume it from the strategy page.

Set up a grid

Field	What it means	Default	Limits and guidance
Strategy name	Label	<token> Grid	Up to 60 characters
Trading pair	The token, always against ADA	—	Must have a pool of at least 5,000 ADA on an allowed DEX
DEX	Which DEXes the grid may price and trade on	Deepest pool across all	Only DEXes hosting the pair are offered
Total investment (₳)	The ADA the grid may commit across all rungs	—	Must be at least the preview's minimum investment and at most its depth ceiling (above it your orders would move the pool too much). Max fills in the wallet balance
Price range	Lower and upper price in ADA per token, or ± % around the current price	—	Lower > 0, upper > lower, current price must be inside. Suggest proposes a band from 7, 30 or 180 days of history (a 3-standard-deviation band, clamped so the current price is inside and each side is at most 50% of the mid)
Grid count	Number of rungs	[VERIFY: initial slider value]	2 up to the preview's maximum (fallback 12). The slider auto-lowers if the preview reduces the cap; the preview shows a recommended count
Slippage tolerance	Worst fill accepted relative to the expected output	0.5%	0.1%–5%
Boundary buffer %	Widens the out-of-range check on both sides so a brief poke outside the band does not pause the grid	0	0 or more; the builder warns above 10. It never moves your lines
Co-sign wallet	The strategy wallet that holds the ADA and tokens and signs every order	—	Must be your wallet, on this network, key in this browser, not linked to another strategy
Risk acknowledgement	Required checkbox	—

Preview. As you type, Surge runs the geometry against the live pool and reports whether the grid is launchable, the recommended grid count and why (largest count whose worst rung still nets more than twice the batcher-plus-network fees, or the maximum feasible, or none), the minimum investment, the depth ceiling, the net profit per cycle for the worst rung, and a list of blocking reasons if any. Deploy is disabled until nothing is blocking.

After creation you can change only the name, description and boundary buffer. Range, grid count, investment, wallet, slippage and DEXes are fixed; make a new grid to change them (clone from the old one).

A second live grid with identical settings on the same wallet is refused.

While it runs

The status badge shows one of the following ([VERIFY: exact on-screen wording of each pause reason]):

Status	Meaning	What to do
Running	Watching the price, rungs armed	Nothing
Paused — out of range	Price is outside your band (plus buffer)	Once the price is back inside, reload the strategy page — the grid re-evaluates when your tab reconnects to it, not on its own. Or stop and recreate with a new band
Paused — socket down	Your tab is closed or the live connection dropped. Queued crossings were discarded	Reopen the tab; it resumes on reconnect
Paused — reserve low	The wallet has less than roughly 10–12 ADA of spare ADA to pay for the next order's deposit, fees and collateral	Fund the wallet, then reload the strategy page so it re-evaluates
Paused — pool shallow	The reference pool fell below 5,000 ADA, or the price feed is not live	Wait, then reload the strategy page
Paused — circuit breaker	Too many lines crossed at once	Check the chart, then click Resume
Stopped	You stopped it	Archive, delete or leave

On the Rungs tab each rung shows its buy/sell lines and its state: armed, pending build, pending sign, submitted, cancelling. The Overview tab shows realized profit (sum of closed cycles), unrealized P&L (tokens held valued at the current mid price minus what they cost), fees paid, the ADA reserve remaining, and how far your ADA/token split has drifted from the launch split. Trade log lists every order.

The socket-down pause outranks every other reason, because without a connection Surge cannot even offer you the cancel that reserve or range recovery might need.

A paused grid receives no price ticks, so out-of-range, reserve-low and pool-shallow pauses are only re-checked when your tab (re)joins the strategy or when the queue next fires. If the condition has cleared and the badge has not, reload the strategy page.

Fees example

A cycle pays two orders' worth of fees. Take a 5,000 ADA grid with 10 rungs (500 ADA per rung) on Minswap, rung lines at 1.000 and 1.030 ADA per token:

	Amount
Buy 500 ADA of tokens at ~1.000 → sell them at ~1.030	gross ≈ +15.0 ADA (pool fee of 0.3% per leg is already inside these prices)
Surge fee: 0.2% × 500 ADA per leg × 2 legs	−2.0 ADA
Batcher fee: 2 ADA × 2	−4.0 ADA
Network fee: ~0.2 ADA × 2	−0.4 ADA
Preview safety buffer: 15% of gross (feasibility check only, not charged)	−2.25 ADA
Net profit per cycle shown in the preview	≈ 6.35 ADA
Realized profit recorded when the cycle closes (no buffer)	≈ 8.6 ADA

The order deposit (2 ADA per order) is locked while an order is open and returned on fill; it is not a cost.

Now the same grid with 100 ADA rungs and 2% spacing: gross ≈ 2 ADA, minus 4.4 ADA of batcher and network fees alone — a loss before the Surge fee. The preview would report this rung as infeasible and block the launch. This is why the minimum investment exists: fixed per-order fees must be small relative to each rung.

Note on the Surge fee: on-chain you pay 0.2% with no minimum; the preview and the recorded fee use a floor of 0.978 ADA per order, so for rungs below about 489 ADA the shown Surge fee is higher than what actually leaves your wallet. See The Surge fee and its minimum.

Wallet interaction

One strategy wallet does everything: it holds the ADA for buy-armed rungs and the tokens for sell-armed rungs, signs every order, receives every fill, and receives every refund. Your browser wallet is only used to fund it. Fund it with the ADA and tokens the Required balance panel shows; a grid launched above the current price needs tokens on day one.

Surge keeps an ADA reserve aside (shown as "reserve remaining") to pay deposits and fees. When that falls below the fee floor the grid pauses rather than failing a build.

Edge cases and failure modes

• Order refunded (Minswap). The rung re-arms on the same side with the same lot and clears its cooldown, so the next crossing fires normally.

• Order parked (SundaeSwap, WingRiders, Splash). After 5 minutes Surge builds a cancel and pushes a Cancel ready prompt to your tab. Sign it to reclaim the funds; the rung then re-arms. While an order is parked the rung occupies the grid's single in-flight slot, so nothing else fires — cancel promptly.

• Price gaps through several lines. Circuit breaker (see above).

• Insufficient ADA. Paused — reserve low. The check is on fee-paying capacity, so a grid that is fully in tokens is not falsely paused.

• You close the tab mid-cycle. Orders already submitted keep waiting for their fill and are picked up on reconnect; rungs that were being built or awaiting signature are reset to armed.

• Same-wallet conflicts. Do not run two grids, or a grid and another strategy, from one wallet; they will collide on chain.

• Late fill of a cancelled order. If a cancel and a fill race and the fill wins after the cycle was already closed, Surge logs it for review instead of booking it against another cycle.

• Cancelling / archiving. Stop the grid first. Archiving is refused while any order is still open or awaiting signature. Delete removes the grid and its history; funds stay in the wallet.

FAQ

Why has my grid not traded even though the price crossed a line? Check the status: out of range, socket down, reserve low or breaker will all hold it. If it says Running, remember one order per two minutes and the two-minute per-rung cooldown; also, the price is re-checked at the moment of building — a brief wick that reverses is skipped.

Why did a rung fill at a worse price than its line? Up to your slippage tolerance is allowed, and up to two minutes can pass between the crossing and the build. Tighten slippage if this matters more than fill rate.

Can I add ADA to a running grid? Not as investment — rung budgets are fixed at creation. Adding ADA to the wallet does raise the fee reserve; reload the strategy page afterwards so a reserve-low grid re-evaluates.

What does "recommended grid count" mean? The largest number of rungs where even the top (narrowest) rung still nets more than twice its batcher and network fees. You can pick more rungs up to the maximum; expect thinner margins.

Does the grid rebalance if price drifts? No. It holds whatever the fills leave it with. The Overview shows the drift from your launch split.

Why can't I edit the range? Because rungs, lots and open cycles are anchored to it. Clone the grid with a new range instead.