Fees and gas
You were charged something and want to know what it was.
This page covers spot. Perps carry costs of their own, funding among them, which are not documented here — if a perp position's margin changed on its own, this page will not explain it.
On spot, three things can charge you without being a trade going against you, and none of them is a trading fee. They are what this page explains. Balances can also move without a trade: a withdrawal, a transfer or a Lend supply that you made, or one of the app's automatic moves, which are topping up the account's signing key with gas, buying 1 SOMI with USDso after a deposit when auto-buy gas is on, converting USDC.e held in the account to USDso, and moving your funds to a new trading account.
There are no trading fees
0% maker, 0% taker. dreamDEX does not take a cut of your trades. The venue is paid from the yield on collateral rather than from charging traders, and makers earn collateral yield on resting orders instead of rebates.
If you are looking for the catch, that is the model: the time-value of the collateral pays for the exchange.
1. Gas, on some things
Actions are on-chain transactions, and Somnia charges gas in its native token: SOMI on mainnet, STT on testnet. Some of it is covered for you and some is not.
The gas token differs by network. Mainnet gas is paid in SOMI; Shannon testnet gas is paid in STT. The venue's spot market is called SOMI on both, so the market name is not the gas token. Wherever this page says SOMI for gas, read STT if you are on testnet.
| Sponsored, you pay nothing | Placing and cancelling orders on SOMI ↔ USDso and USDC.e ↔ USDso · withdrawals from your trading account · the account's own gas top-ups |
| You pay gas yourself | Orders and cancels on every other pair · a first-time token approval sent on its own · creating or cancelling a stop order · anything on Lend |
It is small. If you saw a few cents of the gas token leave on an order or cancel on an unsponsored pair, this is what it was. It goes to the network, not to us.
2. A builder fee, if you approved one
Builder codes let a front-end or integrator charge a per-fill fee on orders it submits for you. It is charged only if you approved that builder yourself, up to the rate you approved and a protocol cap, and it is taken on top of the trade rather than out of it.
The dreamDEX app does not tag orders with a builder, so if you have only ever traded here you have not paid one. If you have used another front-end built on the same book, check what you approved there. Approving a rate of zero revokes it.
3. The stop order fee
Creating a stop order pays an exact fee in the network's gas token with the transaction. It is not a trading fee and it is not gas. It funds the on-chain watcher that monitors the price and fires the order for you.
It comes back if the order never fires. Cancelling a pending stop refunds the payment in full. Once the stop triggers the payment is consumed and is not refunded, and that holds whether or not the resulting order actually filled — the watcher did its work either way. So a charge you are looking for is still yours while the stop is pending, and gone once it has fired.
Lend is separate, and it is not your trading margin
The Lend page lets you supply spot assets into SomniaLend, the Somnia ecosystem's lending protocol, and borrow against them, without leaving the app. It covers the whole lifecycle: supply, withdraw, enable or disable collateral, borrow and repay. It is worth knowing a few things before you use it, because they are not what people assume:
- It uses your smart wallet balance, not your trading margin. It does not touch funds you have put into trading, and nothing is supplied or borrowed unless you action it
- Rates are variable and can fall to zero when nothing is being borrowed
- Withdrawals depend on the pool having un-borrowed liquidity at that moment. Usually immediate, not guaranteed to be
- Borrowing puts your supplied assets at risk. Every borrow shows the health factor you will be left with; below 1, part of your collateral can be liquidated by third parties to repay the debt, with a penalty
Lend transactions are not gas-sponsored. The app holds back 0.1 (SOMI on mainnet, STT on testnet) of the gas token in your trading account and will not let you supply it. That reserve is not the gas for the supply itself — it is what tops your account's gas allowance back up as it runs down. Supplying the last of it would leave nothing to refill from, and nothing to pay for the withdrawal that would get you out again.
Supplied assets sit in the SomniaLend contracts, not in a dreamDEX vault. It is the same pool you would reach at SomniaLend directly.