Fee Mechanics

The published tier table on Trading Fees is what a trade normally costs. This page covers the on-chain mechanics behind it: the levers that can move your fee away from the published number, and the full per-fill split of the fee once it is collected.

Velocity’s tiered fees for futures markets are based only on an on-chain calculation of 30-Day Volume. There is no governance-token staking discount; any such discount was removed as part of the fee redesign.

Velocity has no spot order book, so there’s no maker/taker fee on spot trades. Direct token swaps are not charged a trading fee.

Where the tier numbers come from

The taker fees and maker rebate shown on the tier table are the values currently live on-chain (FeeStructure.feeTiers); an admin can update them (updatePerpFeeStructure), so treat the table as current rather than fixed. The 30-day-volume breakpoints are indicative.

The tier fee itself is the BTC/ETH/SOL column. Markets outside those three reach the higher number through the per-market taker-fee add-on (takerFeeAddonTenthBps), currently 15 tenth-bps, that is 1.5 bps on top of the tier fee at every tier. The add-on does not touch the maker rebate, so the rebate is the same on every market. See Fee Adjustments.

The volume window is evaluated live: crossing a higher-tier threshold applies to your very next fill, and dropping back down also tracks the live trailing 30-day value at each fill rather than a lazily-updated stored sum.

A global promo tier floor can also raise your effective tier; see Fee Adjustments below.

Referral rewards apply at every tier: the referrer earns a share of the taker fee, and the referee gets 5% off theirs. Both percentages apply to the effective taker fee paid. The referrer’s share accrues to the referrer’s RevenueShareEscrow, and the referee’s discount is never collected in the first place. Maker fills do not generate referral rewards. These are fee-tier values on-chain (refereeFeeNumerator / referrerRewardNumerator) and an admin can change them, so check perpFeeStructure.feeTiers on the State account for the live numbers. See the Referral Links page for how the two referrer levels are granted.

Fee Adjustments

Three levers can move the fee you actually pay away from the published tier fee. Two are per-market, one is global.

PerpMarket.feeAdjustment (per-market, multiplicative). Longer tail assets can have increased fees to stay in line with external markets’ fee schedules. Some markets will periodically have flat discounts applied to all fee tiers. The adjustment scales the whole configured fee, and it is the only one of the three that also scales the maker rebate.

PerpMarket.takerFeeAddonTenthBps (per-market, additive). An absolute surcharge added to the tier’s taker fee, expressed in tenth-bps (10 = 1 bp). It exists because a multiplicative feeAdjustment cannot express the same absolute markup across three different tier fees. The field is unsigned, so it can only raise the taker fee, never cut it below the tier fee. That keeps the maker rebate funded at every tier. The ceiling is MAX_TAKER_FEE_ADDON_TENTH_BPS = 100, that is 10 bps. The add-on does not touch the maker rebate.

State.promoFeeTier (global, a tier floor). While set, every account’s effective perp tier is max(volume tier, promoFeeTier), clamped to the highest live tier index (2). Nobody is demoted by it, and there is no per-user state: set it back to 0 (the disabled value) and every account is back on its own volume tier at its next fill.

Putting the per-market pieces together, the taker fee on a fill is:


taker_fee = (tier_fee + notional × taker_fee_addon_tenth_bps / 100_000) × (1 ± fee_adjustment%)

So an observed fee above the published tier number is normally an add-on or a positive feeAdjustment, and an observed fee at a better tier than your own 30-day volume implies is normally an active promoFeeTier.

Fee Redesign

Velocity’s fee model is a clean per-fill split, not an insurance-fund waterfall. The full taker-fee decomposition, in order:


taker_fee  = ceil(notional × fee_numerator / FEE_DENOMINATOR)   tiered by 30d volume,
             + notional × taker_fee_addon_tenth_bps / 100_000    plus a per-market add-on,
                                                                  ± per-market fee_adjustment
          − referee_discount          (reduces what the taker pays; never collected)
          − referrer_reward           (→ referrer, via RevenueShareEscrow)
          − filler_reward             (→ keeper, as perp quote PnL)
          − maker_rebate              (→ maker; match path only)
          − vamm_maker_rebate        (→ AMM; only when the VammMakerRebate flag
                                       is on and the vAMM is the maker)
          ───────────────────────────
remainder ── × amm_fee_numerator%      → AMM fee provision (spendable AMM liquidity; the
          │                              bankruptcy backstop of last resort)
          ── × if_fee_numerator%       → insurance fund (via the pnl-pool sweep)
          ── residual                  → protocol (withdrawable `protocol_fee_pool`)

A builder fee sits outside this split entirely: it is charged on top of the taker fee and passed through to the builder, so it changes neither the taker’s fee tier nor the protocol’s cut. See Builder Codes.

The AMM/IF split (FeeStructure.ammFeeNumerator / ifFeeNumerator) defaults to 0%/0% (the protocol receives 100% of the trade-fee remainder as the residual claimant) and is admin-configurable up to ammFeeNumerator + ifFeeNumerator ≤ 100%.

vAMM maker rebate

State.featureBitFlags carries a VammMakerRebate bit, off by default and toggled exchange-wide (not per market) by updateFeatureBitFlagsVammMakerRebate. Enabling it turns on one extra line in the waterfall above: when the vAMM is the maker on a fill, it earns a maker rebate the same way a user maker does.

The rebate is carved off the remainder before the AMM / IF / protocol split, then added back into amm_fee, so it reaches the AMM through the existing fee-provision plumbing.
It is computed from the base tier (feeTiers[0]) maker rebate, not the taker’s tier. A rebate belongs to the maker, and the vAMM has no volume tier of its own, so pinning it to tier 0 keeps it independent of who the taker is.
The per-market feeAdjustment scales it, exactly as it scales a user maker’s rebate.
It is clamped to whatever remainder is left, because the fee-structure numerators are admin-mutable and the rebate is not guaranteed to fit.
The taker’s fee is unchanged. Only the distribution of the remainder shifts, away from the protocol and insurance-fund legs and toward the AMM.

If you reconcile OrderActionRecord fee legs or estimate the protocol and insurance-fund cut from a fill, read the flag before assuming the remainder splits three ways. See Velocity AMM.

Key differences from the pre-redesign model

Protocol fees are directly withdrawable, not part of the backstop. They land in a per-market protocol_fee_pool and exit via withdraw_protocol_fees_perp / withdraw_protocol_fees_spot, recipient-locked to State.protocolFeeRecipientPerp / protocolFeeRecipientSpot (each settable only by cold_admin) and gated by a dedicated FeeWithdraw hot key. A withdrawal is always capped to the pool’s own balance and can never dip into user deposits.
The AMM’s books contain only its own money. Its fee provision is real, spendable liquidity, but the market tracks the cumulative amount received (feeLedger.ammProtocolFeesReceived) so a perp bankruptcy can claw back what’s still recoverable as the backstop of last resort. The AMM’s own trading/spread capital beyond that provision is never touched.
The Insurance Fund is 100% staker-owned. There are no protocol IF shares: every settled dollar accrues to stakers as share-price appreciation (see Liquidations and Insurance Fund).
Liquidations carry an explicit protocol cut (protocol_liquidation_fee), split IF-first against the existing insurance-fee budget so it can never push a liquidation into bankruptcy. See Liquidations.

Spot Market Fees

There’s no spot order book (per Order Types), so there’s no maker/taker fee to charge on spot trades in the first place. Direct swaps via begin_swap / end_swap are charged no trading fee. The swap fee on that path is hardcoded to zero.

Other spot-market fees (liquidator fee, insurance/protocol factors on lending yield) still apply. See Other Trading Fees.

Disclaimers

There are risks associated with Insurance Fund Staking. Read more about the Insurance Fund Staking and Risks).