XRayTrade Fee Guide
XBT/USD Perpetual Swap on BitMEX
At the moment, XRayTrade only supports BitMEX, and since we don’t charge any fees on top of theirs, all you need to know for now is how their trading fees work.
Every time you make a trade with XBT, you’ll pay a percentage of the trade’s value:
- Taker Fee: 0.075%
- Maker Fee: -0.025%
Taker Fee
A Taker is a trader who executes an order that gets filled straight away by taking an already existing order on the order book. A Maker is a trader who creates an order that gets put on the order book waiting to be taken by someone else. Let’s look at that in more detail:
A Taker Fee applies when you make a trade that fills an existing order on the order book.
Suppose that the lowest ask order (sell) on the books is 1BTC for $10,000. And you go ahead and place an order to buy 1BTC at $10,000.
Your order will get processed immediately, and fill the order on the order book. When this happens you will pay 0.075% of the total value of the trade. In this case, the total fee would be $7.50 ($10,000 * 0.00075).
It’s important to note that all Market Orders will automatically pay a Taker Fee, since they will always be consuming existing orders on the order book.
Maker Fee
A Maker Fee applies when you place an order on the order book and someone else comes and fills it.
Maker Fee
Suppose that you place a 1BTC buy order for $10,000, but there weren’t any existing sell orders for the price you want to buy at.
This means that your 1BTC buy order that you want to buy at a price of $10,000 would appear on the order book, and you’d have to wait for someone else to accept to sell to you.
Once someone else fills your order, a Maker Fee is applied. You may have noticed that it is a negative value. You actually receive a small amount for being the Maker in a transaction.
In this example, you would receive $2.50 as a bonus for the trade ($10,000 x 0.00025). That’s 0.025% you can earn from being a Maker.
You might be wondering why an exchange would offer a negative fee, and effectively pay its users to make trades.
It’s a mechanism to provide liquidity. The fee will always be covered by the Taker Fee. This is an effective way of keeping the order book liquid and the spread thin.
Funding Rate
Another fee to keep in mind is the Funding Rate. The Funding Rate is a dynamic fee applied 3 times a day at 8-hours intervals. It is a peer-to-peer exchange between the long and short traders on the market, this means that neither BitMEX nor XRayTrade are collecting those fees.
Here’s an example: if the Funding Rate is positive at 0.1% this means that traders going long will pay the traders going short. If you held a long position of $10,000 you would have to pay the shorts a $10 fee ($10,000 * 0.001).
Alternatively if the Funding Rate is negative at -0.1% this would mean that shorts will pay you $10 based on your $10,000 long position.
Useful information to know about Funding Rate:
- There is a cap of 0.375% every 8 hours (which occurs 3 times a day), that the funding rate will never exceed.
- That equals to a cap of 1.125% per day.
- You can exit your position before 04:00 UTC, 12:00 UTC and 20:00 UTC to avoid the Funding Rate.
For the time being those are the only fees that you need to know about while using XRayTrade (pretty sweet, huh?).
Eventually, however, we do plan on adding a single, static deposit fee when funding your XRayTrade account. This will be based on the Bitcoin network transaction fees, which we will need to pay every time we fund your Bitmex account from our own server.
If you would like a more detailed explanation on fees, you can get that here. For more information on funding check it out here.
But for now, you don’t need to worry about that — just keep in mind the Maker, Taker Fees and Funding Rate above, and you’re good to go.
Happy Trading!
