Introduction
In line with industry standards, fees are calculated on the value of the total position size (leverage x collateral).Fees Breakdown
The “Market/Limit” fee below goes to the protocol fee distribution if the order is a market order, and to oracle bots if the order is a limit order. Additionally, the referrer rewards are always taken from the “Governance Fund” fees. Finally, while all trades are open, they accrue holding fees: a borrowing fee, which goes into the overcollateral layer of the corresponding gToken vault, and a funding fee, which is paid between traders and can be earned rather than paid. Gains Network earns revenue from trading fees on Gains. Fees are distributed as follows: • Governance (DAO): 76% for protocol operations and incentives• Vault (Liquidity Providers): 15% for underwriting trades
• Referrals: 5%
• Trigger Keepers: 4% The share previously allocated to the GNS buyback & burn is, for now, directed to the Governance (DAO).
Cryptocurrencies
Most cryptocurrencies have no fixed spread (0%); their cost comes from price impact, which depends on liquidity, open-interest skew, and trade size. The exception is BTC/USD and ETH/USD, which carry a fixed spread of 0.005% per side (0.01% round trip) — the same level as major forex — and have no liquidity-impact depth configured, so they incur effectively no size-based impact on top of it. For all other crypto pairs, price impact is minimal for the deepest markets and larger for smaller, less liquid pairs. BTC and ETH- Opening a trade: 0.035%
- Closing a trade: 0.035%
- Opening a trade: 0.05%
- Closing a trade: 0.05%
- Opening a trade: 0.06%
- Closing a trade: 0.06%
Degen
Degen pairs are high-leverage variants offering a fixed 500x leverage. The available degen pairs are:- BTCDEGEN/USD
- ETHDEGEN/USD
- SOLDEGEN/USD
- BNBDEGEN/USD
- HYPEDEGEN/USD
- ZECDEGEN/USD
- Opening a trade: 0.02%
- Closing a trade: 0.02%
Forex (Major)
Spreads on all major forex pairs are fixed at 0.005% per side (0.01% round trip).- Opening a trade: 0.012%
- Closing a trade: 0.012%
Forex (Minor)
Spreads on all minor pairs are fixed at 0.005% per side (0.01% round trip).- Opening a trade: 0.016%
- Closing a trade: 0.016%
Forex (Exotic)
Spreads on all exotic forex pairs are set per pair depending on their volatility.- Opening a trade: 0.02%
- Closing a trade: 0.02%
Commodities
Commodities are configured per pair rather than by a single tier, so both the fee and the fixed spread vary by asset. Currently listed:
Each fee is charged on the total position size, on both opening and closing.
Stocks
Stock fees vary by pair. Each stock sits in one of three fee groups, charged on both opening and closing:Indices
- Opening a trade: 0.05%
- Closing a trade: 0.05%
Lifecycle of a Trade
Opening Fee
Let’s say we use 250 USDC at 10x leverage to long a non-core crypto pair. The fee is applied to leveraged amount: 2,500 USDC. 2,500 * (0.06/100) = 1.5 USDC fee 248.5 USDC is the total collateral value of your newly opened trade, and therefore its total position size is 2,485 USDC.Fixed Spread
When opening a trade the Chainlink oracle returns a price for the asset. If the pair has a fixed spread, it is then applied to that price. For instance, with a 0.04% fixed spread on an oracle price of 3,003.19, the open price would be 3004.39 before consideration of the dynamic spread (see section below). That is: 3,003.19 + (3,003.19 * 0.04 / 100) = 3004.39 Note that most crypto pairs have no fixed spread (0%), in which case only price impact applies. BTC and ETH are an exception among cryptos: they carry a fixed spread of 0.005% per side (0.01% round trip). See the fees breakdown for per-class spreads. Spreads vary by pair. Smaller pairs with lower liquidity usually have a higher spread. The spread is displayed next to Price in the trade parameters and can be confirmed in the Pairs Storage contract by searching for the relevant pair index.Price Impact
On top of any fixed spread, every trade is subject to price impact, which reflects the pair’s real-time order-book liquidity, its current open-interest skew, and the size and direction of your trade. Price impact is dynamic: it changes block to block, and trading against the prevailing flow can make it favorable. The total applied to a trade is: Total price impact = Fixed spread + Liquidity impact + Skew impact This total is displayed as Price impact in the trade parameters, with the per-component breakdown in its tooltip, and is added to (or subtracted from) the oracle price to produce your execution price. Not every pair carries every component — it depends on what is configured on-chain for that pair:- Most cryptocurrencies and forex have liquidity impact (forex’s is tiny because its books are very deep). Skew impact applies where a skew depth is configured.
- Stocks, commodities, and indices are fixed-spread only — they have no liquidity impact or skew impact, so the fixed spread is their entire spread cost.
- BTC and ETH carry a fixed spread of 0.005% per side (0.01% round trip) but have no liquidity impact (no depth bands are configured) and only a negligible skew component — so apart from that flat fixed spread, their price impact is effectively 0.
Liquidity impact
Liquidity impact (previously called “dynamic spread”) depends on:- the pair’s recent open interest, accumulated over short rolling volume windows — so it builds up with activity and decays over a few minutes,
- the size of your trade, and
- the pair’s order-book depth — the 1% depth in each direction (long: 1% depth above / short: 1% depth below), sourced from Binance and split into depth bands.
Skew impact
Skew impact depends on the pair’s current open-interest imbalance (long OI vs short OI). Trades that increase the imbalance (trading with the heavier side) pay more; trades that reduce it (trading against the heavier side) pay less, and can even receive a better-than-oracle price. This keeps open interest balanced without requiring a lower maximum open interest.Example
Suppose you open a 10,000 USDC long on a crypto pair whose “1% depth above” is 2,000,000 USDC, with 500,000 USDC of recent long open interest in the volume windows. The liquidity impact is approximately: (500,000 + 10,000 / 2) / 2,000,000 ≈ 0.25% This pair — like most cryptos, but unlike BTC and ETH — has no fixed spread, so this applies directly to the oracle price: on an oracle price of 150.00 the execution price would be about 150.38. Any skew impact is applied on the same basis. Because impact scales with trade size relative to depth, the same notional costs very different amounts across pairs. A 10,000 USDC order on a smaller-cap pair with ~120,000 USDC of depth incurs roughly 0.06% liquidity impact; the same order on BTC or ETH incurs ~0% liquidity impact, because those pairs have no liquidity-impact depth bands configured (they instead charge a flat 0.005%-per-side fixed spread, not because their books are merely deeper). And at a tiny size — say a few dollars — liquidity impact rounds to ~0% on every pair.Holding Fees
While a trade is open it accrues holding fees, charged continuously on the total position size (leverage x collateral). Holding fees are the sum of two separate components:- Funding fees — balance long and short exposure. You can pay or earn these.
- Borrowing fees — charge the dominant side for using vault liquidity. You always pay these.
Funding Fee
Funding fees balance the two sides of a market. Whichever side has more open interest pays the other side: if the market is net long, longs pay shorts; if it is net short, shorts pay longs. This makes funding the one fee on Gains that can work in your favour — if you open on the lighter side of an imbalanced market, you earn funding for as long as you hold that position and the imbalance persists. The rate is not fixed. It accelerates the more imbalanced a market becomes and the longer that imbalance lasts, which increases the incentive to take the underweighted side and brings open interest back toward balance. It then decays as the market rebalances. Funding fees are charged per second on a trade’s total position size, and apply only to positions opened under v10.Borrowing Fee
Borrowing fees treat open trades of the dominant side as vault borrowers. The fee is determined by a pair’s (or the group the pair is part of) net OI relative to the overall vault TVL, meaning pairs (or groups) with more lopsided OI will charge more than pairs with balanced OI. The fee is charged per block on a trade’s total position size and is calculated as follows:feePerBlock = baseFeePerBlock * (effectiveOi / maxOi) ^ exponent
where effectiveOi is calculated as follows:
effectiveOi = Math.min(Math.max(Math.abs(long - short), max * minP), max * maxP)
effectiveOi is calculated by finding the delta between the side that is long and the side that is short. This value is then clamped using minP and maxP to create a floor and a ceiling, ensuring that both a minimum fee is always paid, and that the fee is never excessive. exponent is used to maintain an exponential relationship between the borrowing fee and the current market conditions.
Note that borrowing fees are only one half of what a trade pays while open — see Holding Fees for how they combine with funding fees.
Liquidation Prices
Trades liquidation prices can get closer over time if you pay borrowing fees. Liquidation Price Distance = Open Price * (Collateral * Liquidation Threshold - Closing Fee - Borrowing Fees) / Collateral / Leverage. Liquidation price =If Long: Open Price - Liquidation Price Distance
Else (Short): Open Price + Liquidation Price Distance. For example, let’s say that you have opened a long on BTC/USD at 20,000 USD using 100x leverage and 50 USDC collateral, the liquidation threshold would be 67%, the closing fee would be 7 USDC (20,000*(0.035/100) and that you have paid 1 USDC in borrowing fees: Liquidation Price = 20,000 - 20,000 * (50 * 0.67 - 7 - 1) / 50 / 100 = 19,898 USD.
Liquidation Thresholds
The liquidation threshold depends on asset class and leverage used. The values can be found in the following table, for Cryptocurrencies, Forex (major), Forex (minor), Forex (exotic), Commodities (gold), Commodities (other)- Cryptocurrencies
- Fx (major)
- Fx (minor)
- Fx (exotic)
- Commodities (gold)
- Commodities (other)
Cryptocurrencies