Exchanges have spent two centuries walking fees down to zero.
In 1792, the brokers who founded what became the NYSE agreed on a 0.25% floor for stock trades.
By the mid-1970s, layered commissions had pushed that as high as 2%, right before the SEC deregulated pricing and set off a decades-long race toward free.
Charles Schwab and Robinhood eventually got commissions to nothing. Crypto perp exchanges are now running the same playbook, just faster.
The logic is simple once you see it. A trade is just information about who’s swapping what for what.
As the cost of moving and validating that information falls, the fee an exchange can justify charging for it falls too.
So exchanges stopped competing on price and started competing on what happens after the click: liquidity, spreads, and where the float sits.
Maker fees are where this shows up first, because makers are the ones building the order book everyone else trades against.
Why “pay the market maker” beats “charge the market maker”
Most CEXs still charge both sides of a trade, a maker fee and a taker fee.
It’s straightforward revenue, and it’s also the reason thinner venues struggle to build real depth: nobody wants to pay to sit passively in the book when a competitor will let them do it for free.
That’s what pushed venues like Variational and Aster to zero maker fees.
The logic is a liquidity-acquisition trade, not generosity. Waiving the maker fee pulls in professional market makers, who tighten spreads and thicken the book.
Tighter spreads and deeper books pull in takers, who pay the fee that actually funds the exchange.
It’s cheaper than running an in-house market-making desk, and it’s especially useful for on-chain perp DEXs trying to match CEX-grade execution without CEX-grade balance sheets.
Grvt has been running a step ahead of that trend: negative maker fees, as a default, not a promotion. Instead of waiving the fee, it pays users to add liquidity.
Most venues that experiment with negative maker rebates cap them around -0.3bps, usually reserved for institutional flow.
Grvt’s baseline extends the same negative structure to retail, across both crypto and RWA markets (the fee table lays out the full structure by tier).
The RWA push
On 7 September, Grvt launched a -1bps negative maker rebate for retail users trading RWA perps, running for three months.
At -1bps, it’s among the most aggressive maker rebates globally, well past what most venues, institutional tiers included, typically offer.
On 20 September, that’s paired with Stable Funding Perps: RWA exposure with predictable funding, USDC settlement, and zero maker and taker fees for retail on that product line.
Together, the two make a specific point about where Grvt is positioning itself in the RWA perps market: RWA exposure with either a rebate for providing liquidity or no fee at all, depending on the product.
Why the fee number isn’t actually the story
A standalone “cheapest maker fee” claim is a weak pitch, because fee wars are easy to start and easy to lose; whoever cuts deepest today gets undercut tomorrow.
The more durable argument is what a negative fee structure is meant to produce: deeper books, tighter spreads, and capital that isn’t just sitting idle as margin.
That’s the compounding case. Negative maker fees attract the liquidity providers who tighten spreads.
Tighter spreads and deeper books improve execution for everyone trading on top of that liquidity, across a growing set of RWA markets.
And composable capital, collateral that can be deployed as both margin and yield-bearing exposure, changes what “cost of trading” even means once you account for what your capital is doing while it sits there.
None of that erases the basic tension in the maker-rebate model.
Someone pays for the rebate, and it’s usually the taker, or the exchange’s own revenue line, or both.
Whether the trade-off holds up depends on whether the deeper liquidity it buys actually sticks around once the promotional period ends.
That’s the part worth watching once the three-month RWA rebate runs its course.
Maker fee rebate comparison
A live snapshot of maker fee and rebate structures across seven trading platforms, pulled directly from each platform’s published fee documentation on 2026-08-26.
| Platform | Base Maker Fee | Maker Rebate? | Where the Rebate Starts | Base Taker Fee |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Grvt | Rebate from tier 1 | Yes — at every tier, from Level 1 | −0.0001% at the lowest tier, scaling to −0.003% at Level 9 | 0.045% → 0.024% across tiers |
| Hyperliquid | 0.015% (Tier 0) | Yes, gated separately from the volume-fee tiers | Requires >0.5% share of total exchange maker volume for −0.001%, up to −0.003% at >3.0% share | 0.045% (Tier 0), down to 0% at >$500M/14-day |
| dYdX | 1.0 bps (Tiers 1–2) | Yes, only at the top two tiers | ≥$100M/30-day volume for −0.007%; ≥$200M/30-day for −0.011% | 5.0 bps down to 2.5 bps |
| OKX X-Perps (EEA) | 0.02% | Yes, at VIP tiers | VIP1 starts at €10M/month or €100K AUM; −0.01% rebate at unspecified higher VIP tiers (full tier table not published on this page) | 0.05%, ~0.015% at higher VIP tiers |
| Aster | 0% (all contract types) | No | N/A — maker fee floors at zero, never goes negative | 0.04% (USDT-perp), 0.005% (USD1-perp), 0.009% (stock perp) |
| Lighter | 0% (Standard accounts) | No | N/A — Standard accounts pay/earn nothing; Premium accounts pay a small positive maker fee (0.0028%–0.0040%) instead of a rebate | 0% (Standard); same tiered scale for Premium |
| BTCTurk | ~0.05% (third-party sourced) | No — likely not applicable | BTCTurk’s linked fee page is a spot exchange schedule; no derivatives/perpetual product or rebate mechanism was found | ~0.09% |
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