Crypto Trading Fees Explained: Network Fees, DEX Fees and Slippage

If you have ever swapped a token and received a bit less than the screen promised, you have met trading fees. Before you run any bot, it helps to know what you are paying for. There are three costs, and they are easy to confuse.

1. Network fee

Every transaction on a blockchain pays the network for processing it.

• Solana: a very small base fee per signature, plus an optional priority fee to get included faster when the network is busy.
• BNB Chain: paid in BNB.
• Robinhood Chain: paid in ETH.

The network fee is the same whether you trade a dollar or a thousand dollars, so it weighs most on small trades.

2. DEX fee

The pool you trade in takes its own cut, which goes to the people providing liquidity. It is built into the price you get. Typical examples:

• PancakeSwap V2: 0.25% per swap.
• Uniswap-style V3 pools: a set tier per pool, commonly from 0.01% up to 1%.
• Solana pools such as Raydium, Orca and Meteora each have their own fee settings, often set per pool.
• pump.fun curve: a small fee is built into curve trades.

Check the specific pool for its current number, since these change.

3. Slippage and price impact

When you buy, you push the price up a little. When you sell, you push it down. On a pool with little liquidity, the effect is bigger. Slippage is the gap between the price you expected and the price you got.

You can usually set a maximum slippage so that a trade fails instead of filling at a bad price. Set it too low and trades fail often. Set it too high and you risk bad fills.

How the fees stack up

Here is an illustration with made-up round numbers, to show the idea (real costs differ):

• You trade $100 on a pool with a 0.25% fee.
• DEX fee: $0.25
• Network fee: a few cents on Solana, more on some other chains
• Slippage on a thin pool: anywhere from almost nothing to a few percent

So a round trip, a buy and then a sell, costs roughly double that. Over hundreds of trades this is the real price of generating activity, and it is why wallets in a long session slowly run low.

Reducing the cost

• Use fewer, larger trades where small ones are not needed. Network fees hit small trades hardest.
• Pick deeper pools. Less slippage.
• Choose the right tool. A bump bot recycles funds between its wallets, so it costs less per hour than a volume run.
• Set a budget and a duration before you start.

For a worked example of a full session, read how much a volume bot costs.

The bottom line

No on-chain trade is free. The honest way to use any bot is to know the fee stack in advance and to decide whether the visibility is worth it. Mentat Booster shows the cost before you launch and sends a progress report every 5 minutes so you can see how a session is going.