Non-trading fees

Trading fees cover what a fill costs. This page covers everything else — the charges that arise from moving funds, holding an account, or using a service the protocol operates.

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At a glance

Bridge and account fees are collected into a separate protocol account from trading fees. The two flows are not commingled, which is what makes each one independently reconcilable from committed blocks.

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Bridge fees

Deposits are free. The protocol charges nothing to credit a deposit. You pay the source chain’s gas to send the transaction, and nothing else — the full amount you locked becomes the balance you can trade. See Deposit. Withdrawals carry a flat fee, deducted from the amount at the moment the balance is burned on Intention. The destination chain receives the requested amount minus that fee, and the fee is credited to the protocol’s system account in the same execution step. You additionally pay the destination chain’s gas. A flat fee rather than a percentage is the right shape here: the cost the protocol is recovering is the cost of submitting an external-chain transaction, which does not scale with the amount being moved. A percentage would overcharge large withdrawals for work that did not get harder. Withdrawals are also batched — requested and finalized in groups — which is why external-chain costs do not grow linearly with the number of withdrawals. See Bridge. There are minimum amounts for both deposits and withdrawals. A minimum exists so a transfer cannot be smaller than the cost of processing it, which would otherwise let the fee exceed the principal.

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Account activation

Transferring funds internally to an address that does not yet have an account creates one, and that first transfer carries a one-time activation fee. Subsequent transfers to the same account are free. Two exemptions are worth knowing:

• Deposits never pay it. Arriving over the bridge activates an account at no charge, so funding a fresh address from outside is not penalized.
• A batch cannot double-charge. If the same new recipient appears more than once in one batch of transfers, activation is charged once.

The fee exists because creating an account creates permanent state that every validator must store and every state proof must carry. Without a cost, generating accounts is a free way to make the network’s state larger for everyone.

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Vault fees

Vaults have their own economics, and they differ sharply between the two kinds. The protocol vault takes no cut. Its profits — currently the spread it earns market making, and what its taker strategy collects — go entirely to depositors, because it is the venue’s own liquidity rather than a managed product. Liquidation takeovers and a share of trading-fee revenue are part of the design but are not routed to it today; see Vaults. A user-created vault pays its leader 10% of profit, assessed per depositor against that depositor’s own weighted-average entry NAV and charged on withdrawal or distribution — so a depositor whose shares are not above what they paid pays nothing. The leader is also required to hold at least 5% of vault value, which is the part that matters more than the fee: it means the leader’s capital moves with the depositors’ rather than only their income. The creation fee is non-refundable and paired with a minimum initial deposit and a trading-volume requirement on the creator’s parent account. Together these price out casual vault creation, which is what keeps the vault list a set of real strategies rather than a directory of abandoned ones.

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Liquidation penalty

Being liquidated costs more than the loss on the position. A penalty is applied to the liquidated position and paid into the insurance fund — the same fund that absorbs shortfalls when a liquidation closes worse than the bankruptcy price. The structure is the point. The accounts that create the risk the insurance fund exists to cover are the accounts that fund it. It is not revenue: nothing about the penalty flows to the protocol’s fee account, and it cannot be paid out as one. The penalty is a per-market parameter, set alongside that market’s other risk parameters and readable with them. See Markets.

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What you are never charged

Gas on trading. Submitting, amending, and cancelling orders are native protocol transactions with no gas requirement and no fee market. See Trading fees. A fee for having a position open. Holding costs funding, which is a transfer between longs and shorts, not a protocol charge. Depending on which side you hold, it is income. A fee for cancelling. Cancellation is free and unlimited. A venue that charges for cancellation gets stale quotes during exactly the volatility where fresh ones matter. An inactivity or maintenance fee. An account that does nothing costs nothing.

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Where to go next