Using AXISCore concepts
Fees and costs
AXIS charges no trading fees. You pay only Stellar network fees.
No trading fees#
AXIS charges no trading fees and no settlement commissions. Makers receive exactly their price, and takers pay exactly the maker's price, apart from rounding of at most one smallest unit per fill (see Rounding). The contract has no fee switch, and because its code cannot be upgraded, no fee can be added later.
Network fees#
Every Stellar transaction pays a fee in XLM. For smart contract calls the fee has three parts:
- Inclusion fee. A bid for a place in the next ledger. It is small, and it rises only when the network is busy and transactions compete for space.
- Resource fee. Payment for what the transaction uses: computation, reading and writing ledger entries, events. Apps estimate it out by simulating the transaction before you sign.
- Rent fee. Charged for temporary storing some of your data (orders) on the blockchain.
Your wallet shows the total before you sign. The more orders a trade fills, the more it writes to the ledger and the higher its resource fee.
Storage rent for new orders#
Each new order is a small ledger entry of about 250 bytes. Stellar charges rent for smart contract storage, paid upfront for a period of time. Creating an order pays about 0.041 XLM for 120 days of storage at the network's current minimum rate. The rent is not refunded when the order fills or when you cancel it.
This works differently from the Classic DEX. There, each offer locks 0.5 XLM of base reserve in your account, and you get it back when the offer closes: the reserve is locked, not spent. Smart contract storage uses rent instead - you pay for the time your data is stored, and the payment is spent rather than locked.
Updating an order in place pays no new 120-day rent chunk, only a small extension for the time since its last update. That is why market makers update their orders rather than cancel and recreate them. Refreshing 40 orders every minute by canceling and recreating them would cost about 100 times more in transaction fees than just updating the existing orders.
Typical fee costs#
| Action | Approximate cost |
|---|---|
| Create an order on the book | 0.042 XLM (0.0007 XLM fee + 0.041 XLM rent) |
| Update one order | 0.0006 XLM |
| Cancel one order | 0.0006 XLM |
| Update 8 orders in one transaction | 0.0031 XLM |
| Trade filling 1 order | 0.003 XLM |
| Trade filling 8 orders | 0.014 XLM |
| Trade filling 20 orders | 0.032 XLM |
| Swap through 2 markets, 1 order each | 0.005 XLM |
| Crossfill of 8 orders | 0.014 XLM |
Note
These are approximate estimates for Stellar mainnet as of September 2026. They cover execution fees and order rent but not the transaction size fee. They can change whenever the network's fee settings change. Apps also usually add some safety margin to the resources they declare, so the fee your wallet shows can be higher. On Testnet you pay with free test XLM.
Trustline reserves#
A classic Stellar account needs a trustline before it can hold any asset other than XLM, such as USDC or EURC. Each trustline locks 0.5 XLM of reserve in your account. This is a refundable deposit, not a fee: you get it back when you remove the trustline. You can create a trustlines in your wallet, see Add trustlines.
Smart contract accounts do not use trustlines. The first time such an account receives a token, a balance entry is created for it, which costs about 0.037 XLM of rent once per token. The transaction that creates the entry pays for it.
Restoring an archived order#
An order that nobody updates for a long time can be archived by the network in about 120 days when its prepaid storage runs out. Any transaction that touches it after that, to fill, update or cancel it, must restore it first and pays a fresh 120 days of rent, similar to creating the order. To avoid this, cancel orders you no longer need and update the ones you want to keep. See Order lifetime.
Market listing fee#
Opening a new market costs a listing fee in XRF, the utility token of the Reflector oracle, paid only by whoever opens the market. The XRF buys access to the oracle price feeds for the pair. On Testnet the fee is currently set to 18,000 XRF. Traders never pay it. See How a market opens.
Who pays what#
| Role in protocol | Pays |
|---|---|
| Trader (taker) | The network fee for each trade or swap, covering every fill in it. |
| Maker | The network fee and storage rent to create an order, and network fees to update or cancel it. A fill of the maker's order costs the maker nothing, because the taker's transaction pays. |
| Market sponsor | The XRF listing fee to open a market, more XRF to extend its oracle price feeds, and the network fees for those calls. |
| Keeper | Network fees for requote calls that refresh cached prices, and the rent that keeps the contract's storage alive. If keepers stop, regular transactions pay the contract's own storage rent as they go. |
| Arbitrager | Whoever calls crossfill on crossed orders pays its network fee and keeps the difference it captures. |
Developers can find the measured resource figures in Resource limits and costs.