Maker and Taker Fees: You Are Being Paid to Wait

An order that rests on the book and is filled by someone else makes liquidity. An order that crosses the spread and fills against a resting order takes it. Venues charge takers more, and often pay makers a rebate.

The economics are obvious from the venue’s side: a book with no resting orders has nothing to trade against, so resting orders are subsidised.

Why the gap matters more than it looks

For a strategy trading frequently, the maker-taker difference compounds across every fill. A system that always crosses pays the taker fee on every entry and every exit; one that can wait pays much less and is sometimes paid.

Over enough trades that difference can exceed the strategy’s entire edge. This is the same arithmetic as gas fees on-chain: a per-transaction cost that is trivial once and decisive at frequency.

What waiting actually costs

Not nothing, which is the part usually omitted. A resting order is a free option granted to the market: it fills when someone wants to trade against you, which is disproportionately when they know something or when the market is moving through your price.

So maker fills are cheaper in fees and systematically worse in timing. The rebate is compensation for adverse selection, not a discount for patience.

The tier structure

Fees usually improve with volume, which means the same trade costs different amounts for different participants. A strategy that is marginal at retail fee tiers can be comfortably profitable at institutional ones — and a backtest run on one tier says little about the other.

Anyone evaluating a published crypto strategy should ask which fee tier it assumed, in the same way any options strategy should be priced at fills rather than mids.

The rule

Fee structure is part of the strategy, not an afterthought applied to it. A method that must take liquidity is a different business from one that can provide it, and the two should not be compared on gross results.