Futures fee
A futures fee is the trading fee on derivatives contracts — 0.05–0.06% taker and 0.02% maker on the exchanges loweef tracks. Low per fill, but charged on leveraged notional.
Futures fees look like the cheapest in crypto, and per unit of notional they are. The catch is the base: fees apply to full position size, so leverage multiplies the fee exactly as it multiplies exposure. A 20x position pays twenty times the fee of an unleveraged position with the same margin.
Combined with the trading frequency derivatives invite, futures fees end up dominating most active traders' cost lines — which is also why the derivatives fee war between exchanges is fought in hundredths of a percent, and why comparing venues on futures rates specifically matters more than any other fee number.
Futures fees are the primary target of fee paybacks. Commission programs are built around derivatives volume, and the 50–67% total rates on loweef's partners apply to these fees — turning the largest recurring cost of active trading into the largest recoverable one. The effective taker rate table shows each partner's post-payback futures cost side by side.
Current futures fees, compared →