The full fee breakdown of a trench trade

The short answer

Every trench trade stacks up to five separate cost layers: a base network fee, an optional priority fee or tip for faster inclusion, the platform or DEX fee (the bonding curve or AMM's own cut), a terminal fee if you're using one, and slippage—the gap between the quoted and executed price. None of these show up as a single obvious line item, which is exactly why they get missed.

Solana: base fee, priority fee, and rent

Solana's base transaction fee is a fixed 5,000 lamports (0.000005 SOL) per signature, with half burned and half paid to the validator (Solana docs). On top of that, an optional priority fee—calculated as compute unit price multiplied by the compute unit limit, divided by 1,000,000—goes entirely to the validator and buys faster inclusion during congestion (Solana fee structure docs). Jito tips are a separate, additional payment layered on top of both, used to get a transaction bundled and included faster still.

Opening a new token account also requires rent—roughly 0.00203928 SOL per kilobyte—which is refundable and returned when the account is closed, but still ties up capital while the position is open.

Robinhood Chain (EVM/Arbitrum): the two-part gas fee

Robinhood Chain runs on Arbitrum's Layer 2 technology, where a single displayed gas fee actually bundles two components: an L2 execution fee, which adjusts to network demand in an EIP-1559-style model, and an L1 data fee, the amortized cost of posting the transaction's compressed data back to Ethereum for security (Arbitrum docs). The wallet shows one number, but that number moves with both L2 congestion and Ethereum L1 gas prices—meaning an Arbitrum-family chain can get noticeably more expensive during an unrelated spike in Ethereum mainnet activity.

L2 chains enforce a minimum base fee even when idle, as spam protection, so gas is never literally zero—just consistently a small fraction of L1 Ethereum's cost under normal conditions.

The platform or DEX fee

This is the venue's own cut of the trade, separate from network fees entirely. Bonding-curve launches charge a fee on every buy and sell while the token is still on the curve, and AMM pools charge their own swap fee once a token has graduated to normal DEX trading—rates vary by platform and market-cap tier, so check the current schedule inside whichever venue you're using rather than assuming a number from months ago still applies. See bonding curves and launches for how this fee sits inside the curve mechanics.

The terminal fee

If you're trading through a dedicated terminal rather than a wallet's native swap interface, the terminal typically adds its own fee on top of the platform fee above. These vary meaningfully by product and sometimes by trade type (manual buy versus automated sniping, for example), and detailed independent comparisons belong in the tool encyclopedia rather than here—the point for this guide is simply that a terminal fee is a distinct layer, not something already included in the platform fee.

Slippage: the cost that isn't a fee

Slippage isn't collected by anyone—it's the difference between the price quoted when you submit a trade and the price it actually fills at, caused by the market moving (or the trade's own size moving the price) in the time between quote and execution. On a thin bonding curve or low-liquidity pool, slippage on a meaningfully sized trade can dwarf every fee layer above combined. Setting a tighter slippage tolerance protects against a bad fill, at the cost of a higher chance the transaction fails outright.

Adding it up

A single round-trip trade—one buy, one sell—pays network fees twice, platform and terminal fees twice, and absorbs slippage on both legs. None of these numbers are large in isolation on a healthy trade, which is exactly why they're easy to ignore until they've quietly eaten a meaningful share of a winning trade's profit, or turned a break-even trade into a loss. For a numeric side-by-side of these layers on Solana versus Robinhood Chain, see Solana vs. Robinhood Chain fees, compared.

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