Zero-Fee Trading - Breakthrough or Behavioral Incentive?
Zero-fee trading isn’t the structural breakthrough people think at first glance.
Zero-fee trading isn’t the structural breakthrough people think at first glance. Platforms like Robinhood pioneered this model and proved that removing visible fees lowers friction and helps to jumpstart orderflow - but the economics don’t vanish.
They simply move somewhere else.
Free trading ≠ free
In practice, the cost of “free” trading shows up in the spread.
Comparing Hyperliquid vs Lighter side-by-side makes this obvious:
・Zero fees attract retail
・Wider spreads pay for it
Same pair, almost same timestamp - left is Hyperliquid, right is Lighter.
Notice the spread difference.
Note: I reference Lighter (feeless retail model) and Hyperliquid (public maker–taker model) simply as representative examples, given their current position as the highest-volume perp DEXs
Why Lighter’s spreads are wider than Hyperliquid’s (even on high-volume pairs)
Lighter’s model gives retail users zero-fee trading while charging high frequency traders (HFT) and market makers (MM) for API access - a transparent analogue to PFOF (payment for order flow) that helps cover frontend costs and filter out toxic flow. But this structure pushes the entire economic burden to the professional side of the market.
For those guys this means:
・ every quote they post has an embedded cost
・ every fill must compensate for those fees
and therefore they widen spreads to maintain profitability.
Wide spreads marterialize because the fees still exist - just not on the frontend.
user facing zero fees → maker-facing hidden cost → wider spreads to offset → long term UX tradeoff?
Zero-fee headlines attract retail, but exchanges need more than marketing.
・qualitative & deep liquidity
・aligned incentives fro all participants
・a sustainable revenue model to stay competitive.
Additionally, this also means liquidity ultimately depends on whether the paying side (HFTs/MMs) can remain profitable, since they’re the ones absorbing the real cost of depth.
Venues like Hyperliquid take a different approach.
Instead of opaque maker–taker deals, they use transparent fee tiers with small, predictable “gas + settlement” execution costs.
Maker fees decrease with volume and are public, rule-based rebates, avoiding the private incentives and rebate gaming common on CEXs.
The result: cleaner incentives and more consistent liquidity.
Ultimately, fees never disappear - they just move.
Hyperliquid exposes them transparently and keeps incentives neutral, while Lighter hides them behind zero-fee headlines and shifts the cost to professionals supplying liquidity.
One model builds durable depth; the other depends on whether its paying traders can keep carrying the load.
In markets, incentives write the outcome - and the structure always wins.
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