Fees

Fees on Proof are deliberately simple: a flat charge on every fill, the same across every kind of market. There are no special cases by instrument, no rebates to model, and no separate fee logic for conditional markets. This page explains the schedule, how a fee is assessed and where it lands in your account economics, why funding is not a fee, and the volume-tiered schedule that exists in the design but is not what current markets use.

It is a conceptual reference — the economics in plain terms, not an integration guide. Every worked number below is illustrative.

The schedule

Every fill is charged a flat fee, set by which side of the fill you were on:

• Taker: 5 basis points (0.05%) of the fill's notional. You are the taker when your order removes liquidity — a market order, or a marketable limit order that crosses the book and fills against a resting order.
• Maker: 2 basis points (0.02%) of the fill's notional. You are the maker when your resting order is the one that gets filled — you posted liquidity and someone else traded against it.

One basis point is 1/10,000, so 5 bps is $5 per $10,000 of notional and 2 bps is $2 per $10,000.

The taker pays more than the maker because the taker consumed liquidity the maker provided. That is the only distinction the schedule draws — same side, same rate, on every market.

The maker side is a charge, not a rebate

This is the point most worth stating plainly, because many venues do the opposite: the maker side is a charge. A maker pays 2 bps to be filled. Proof does not pay makers a rebate, and there is no negative fee anywhere in the schedule. Both sides of every fill pay — the taker pays 5 bps and the maker pays 2 bps, both out of their own account.

So when you model the all-in cost of a round trip, count both legs as costs. If you provide on entry and take on exit, you pay 2 bps then 5 bps; if you take on both, you pay 5 bps twice. There is no leg of the trade where the exchange pays you for the fill itself. (Funding, covered below, is a separate flow between traders and is not part of this at all.)

Identical across every market kind

The same flat 5 bps taker / 2 bps maker schedule applies to every market on Proof, with no exceptions by instrument type:

• Perpetuals — the plain underlying perps.
• Conditional perpetuals — the YES and NO conditional legs of a conditional market.
• Prediction binaries — the $0–$1 YES and NO binaries of a conditional market.

There is no premium fee for trading conditional markets and no discount, either. A fill on a prediction binary is charged exactly the way a fill on a vanilla perpetual is: by side, on notional, at the same rate. This matters when you are building or unwinding a position that spans the family — every leg you trade is charged on its own fill at its own side, and you can total them up with one schedule rather than tracking different rates per instrument. For what the legs of a conditional market are and how they fit together, see Market Structure & Instruments and What You Can Trade.

How a fee is assessed

A fee is charged per fill, on the fill's notional, in the account's collateral currency.

Take each piece in turn:

• Per fill, not per order. The unit that gets charged is an execution, not an order submission. If one order fills in several pieces — say it sweeps three resting orders at three price levels — each of those fills is charged separately, on its own size, at the side you were on for that fill. A resting order that never fills is never charged. An order that fills in one clean piece is charged once.
• On notional. The base for the fee is the value of what traded — the fill's price times its size — not your margin, your leverage, or your account equity. Because the fee tracks notional rather than margin, your leverage does not change what a fill costs: trading $50,000 of notional costs the same fee whether you posted $5,000 or $25,000 of margin behind it. On a prediction binary, the notional is the binary's price times size in the usual way — a fill of 100 binaries at $0.40 is $40 of notional, and the fee is charged on that.
• In the collateral currency. The fee is denominated and deducted in the same single collateral currency your account is margined in. There is no separate fee token and nothing to hold aside for fees specifically; the charge comes straight out of the account's settled cash.

Where the fee lands in your economics

A fee is a realized cost the moment the fill happens. Concretely:

• It reduces realized PnL on the trade. The fee is folded into the cash result of the fill — it does not move your entry price or your position size, it is booked as a cash cost against your balance. Your cost basis stays clean; the fee shows up as a settled outflow, the same way funding does.
• Because it comes out of settled cash, it reduces your balance, and therefore your equity and free margin. Equity is balance plus unrealized PnL; a fee lowers the balance term directly, so it lowers equity dollar-for-dollar and lowers the free margin you have to deploy or withdraw. (For how balance, equity, and free margin relate, see How Trading Works.)
• It is charged at fill time, not deferred to close or settlement. Each fill that builds, reduces, or closes a position is charged as it happens. When you eventually settle or cash out a position, the fees you paid along the way are already out of your balance — there is no separate fee reckoning at the end.

The practical reading: the fee is part of the trade's economics from the first fill. A strategy's edge has to clear the round-trip fee on every leg it touches before it is profitable. A box built across a conditional family pays a fill fee on each leg it uses to construct and to unwind — small per leg, but real, and worth totalling when the edge you are capturing is thin.

Funding is not a fee

It is easy to lump funding in with fees because both move your cash balance, but they are different in kind and it is worth keeping them apart.

Funding is a payment between traders, not a fee paid to the exchange. On a perpetual, funding is a periodic payment that flows directly between the longs and the shorts to keep the perp tethered to its underlying. It is zero-sum at the market level — every dollar one side pays, the other side receives — and the exchange takes no cut of it. Sometimes you pay funding; sometimes you receive it. It can be a credit to your balance.

A fee, by contrast, is always a charge, always flows out of your account, and is never received. The two never net against each other conceptually: a fee is the cost of executing a fill, funding is the cost (or yield) of holding a perpetual position across a funding period.

A second distinction: funding applies to perpetuals only, while fees apply to fills on every market kind. The conditional legs of a conditional market — both conditional perpetuals and both prediction binaries — never accrue funding, but they are charged the same fill fee as everything else. So a conditional-leg trade pays fees and never pays funding; a perpetual trade can do both. For the full mechanics of the funding payment, see Funding.

A worked example

All numbers here are illustrative, chosen for round arithmetic — they are not live or canonical values.

Suppose you trade a perpetual with an oracle around $100, and you do a complete round trip:

Entry — you provide liquidity (maker). You post a resting bid for 100 contracts at $100, and someone trades against it. Your fill notional is:

100 × $100 = $10,000

You are the maker on this fill, so you pay the 2 bps maker fee:

2 bps × $10,000 = 0.0002 × $10,000 = $2.00

Exit — you take liquidity (taker). The price has moved to $101 and you close by sending a market order that lifts a resting offer for your full 100 contracts. Your fill notional is:

100 × $101 = $10,100

You are the taker on this fill, so you pay the 5 bps taker fee:

5 bps × $10,100 = 0.0005 × $10,100 ≈ $5.05

Putting it together. Your gross trading gain on the move is (mark − entry) × size = ($101 − $100) × 100 = $100. Your total fees for the round trip are $2.00 (maker, entry) + $5.05 (taker, exit) ≈ $7.05. So your realized PnL after fees is:

$100 − $7.05 ≈ $92.95

Both fees came out of your collateral balance at the moment each fill happened — the $2.00 when your bid was hit, the $5.05 when your market order filled — and each lowered your balance, equity, and free margin as it landed. Nothing here is funding: any funding you paid or received while the position was open would be a separate cash flow between you and the traders on the other side of the perp, not part of this fee total.

Had every leg been on a conditional perpetual or a prediction binary instead, the fee arithmetic would be identical — same sides, same rates, same notional basis — because the schedule does not vary by market kind.

The volume-tiered schedule

The flat schedule above is what current markets use. The design also includes a volume-tiered schedule — a structure in which an account's fee rate can step down as its trading volume grows, the familiar maker/taker tier ladder used across exchanges.

The two coexist by design: the tiered structure is part of how fees are modeled, and the flat 5 bps taker / 2 bps maker schedule is the one in force on current markets. For planning purposes, price your strategies against the flat schedule — it is what every fill is charged today, on every market kind. The tiered structure changes how the rate is selected for an account; it does not change the per-fill, on-notional, in-collateral-currency mechanics described above, nor the fact that the maker side is a charge rather than a rebate.

Because the specific rate that applies to your account is the kind of thing that can evolve, treat the mechanism on this page as the durable part and the specific rate as a current value. For the exact rate in force, refer to the product surface, which always reflects what is live.

Quick reference

• Flat schedule: 5 bps taker / 2 bps maker, on every market kind — perpetuals, conditional perpetuals, and prediction binaries alike. (Illustrative-friendly: 5 bps = $5 per $10,000; 2 bps = $2 per $10,000.)
• Maker side is a charge, not a rebate. Both sides of every fill pay; the exchange never pays you for a fill. Count both legs of a round trip as costs.
• Assessed per fill, on the fill's notional, in the collateral currency. A multi-piece order is charged piece by piece; a resting order that never fills is never charged. Leverage doesn't change the fee.
• Lands as a realized cost at fill time — reduces realized PnL and lowers balance, equity, and free margin. Entry price and position size are untouched.
• Funding is not a fee. Funding is a zero-sum payment between traders (perpetuals only) that you can receive; a fee is always a charge to the exchange and applies to fills on every market kind. See Funding.
• A volume-tiered schedule exists in the design; current markets use the flat schedule. Price against the flat rates; check the product surface for the live rate.