The advertised fee is the smallest part of what trading costs. The full stack is fee plus spread plus slippage plus, depending on venue, gas and funding — and for active strategies the stack routinely exceeds the edge.
| Cost | Where it applies | Typical scale |
|---|---|---|
| Taker fee | Removing liquidity from a book | 0.02%–0.10% per side |
| Maker fee | Adding resting liquidity | 0% to 0.05%, sometimes a rebate |
| Spread | Every market order | A basis point on majors, percent on thin pairs |
| Slippage | Any order large relative to depth | Unbounded — this is the one that ruins strategies |
| Pool fee | AMM swaps | 0.01%–1% depending on the tier |
| Gas | On-chain transactions | Fixed in currency, so brutal on small trades |
Perpetual positions add funding, charged every few hours for as long as the position is open.
A 0.10% taker fee on both sides of a trade is 0.20% per round trip. Two hundred round trips a year on a fully deployed account is 40% of capital — larger than the annual return of most strategies that trade that often. The same system executed with limit orders at a 0.02% maker fee pays 8%. Nothing about the strategy changed; only the execution did.
break-even = entry × (1 + entry fee) ÷ (1 − exit fee)
Every position starts underwater by the round-trip cost. On short-horizon trades, that distance can be a meaningful fraction of the move you are trying to capture — which is the arithmetic argument against scalping thin markets.
Gas is a fixed amount of currency rather than a percentage, so it dominates small trades and disappears on large ones. A $14 gas cost is 23% of a $60 swap and 0.03% of a $50,000 one. This single fact is why layer-2 networks exist, and why a strategy that requires frequent on-chain rebalancing is usually impossible on an expensive chain regardless of how good the signal is.
Before adopting any system, compute its all-in annual cost: (round trips × round-trip fee) + (round trips × expected slippage) + funding + gas. Put that number next to the expected return. If they are the same order of magnitude, the strategy is a fee-generation machine with a trading hobby attached.
Makers add resting liquidity to the book and are charged less or paid a rebate; takers remove liquidity immediately and pay more. Limit orders usually earn the maker rate, market orders always pay the taker rate.
No, but it is a cost, and it is often larger than the fee. It comes from the spread, from your own price impact, and from the market moving between your click and the fill.
A swap pays the pool fee plus price impact plus gas. On a small trade on an expensive chain, gas alone can dwarf a centralised venue's entire fee.
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