Fees
Here's the honest version of how Kohana makes money: a small fee on trades, and that's basically it.
We're not the house. We never take the other side of your bet, and we don't make a cent when you lose.
What you pay to trade
Every trade carries a small fee, and which one depends on whether you added liquidity to the market or took it.
Rest an order in the book and wait, and you're the maker, you gave other people something to trade against, so you pay the lower rate. Cross the spread to fill right now, and you're the taker, who pays a touch more.
Rates run around 1% for makers and 2% for takers. They're a setting, not a law of nature, so the exact number for your trade is always on the order ticket before you confirm. Both sides pay only when the trade actually matches. Cancel, or never fill, and you pay nothing.
Where the fees go
Trading fees flow into a separate platform treasury, deliberately kept apart from the money that trades in markets.
That separation is the whole point. Kohana earns on volume, not on your losses. Winners are still paid $1 a share from the market's own escrow, funded by the people betting in it, and we never touch that pot. It's what no house edge actually means.
What's free
- Creating a market costs nothing. Your only outlay is the bit of starting liquidity you seed, and that's your own position, not a fee.
- No deposit fee on crypto.
- No fee on orders that cancel or never fill.
- No account, inactivity, or balance-holding fees.
The on-chain bit
Settling a trade onto the blockchain costs a sliver of gas, usually a cent or two. It's baked into the fee on your ticket, nothing you have to set aside or top up, and like the trading fee, it's refunded if your order never fills.
Always shown first
Whatever the fee, you see the exact number on the ticket before you confirm. Nothing is taken after the fact, and there are no surprise charges. The current rates live on the in-app fee screen.