For over two centuries, exchanges have been on a relentless march toward zero trading fees. In 1792, the brokers who founded the New York Stock Exchange set a minimum commission of 0.25%. By the mid-1970s, layered commissions had pushed costs as high as 2% before the SEC deregulated pricing, sparking a decades-long race to free trading. Charles Schwab and Robinhood eventually brought stock commissions to zero, and crypto perpetual futures exchanges are now running the same playbook at warp speed.
The underlying logic is simple: a trade is essentially information about who is swapping what for what. As the cost of moving and validating that information collapses, the fee an exchange can justify charging falls with it. So exchanges have stopped competing on price and started competing on what happens after the click—liquidity, spreads, and where the float sits. Maker fees are where this shift first shows up, because makers are the ones building the order book that everyone else trades against.
Why paying the market maker beats charging them
Most centralized exchanges still charge both sides of a trade—a maker fee and a taker fee. It's straightforward revenue, but it's also why thinner venues struggle to build real depth: nobody wants to pay to sit passively in the book when a competitor will let them do it for free. That's what pushed venues like Variational and Aster to zero maker fees. The logic is a liquidity-acquisition trade, not generosity. Waiving the maker fee pulls in professional market makers, who tighten spreads and thicken the book. Tighter spreads and deeper books then attract takers, who pay the fee that actually funds the exchange. It's cheaper than running an in-house market-making desk, and it's especially useful for on-chain perp DEXs trying to match CEX-grade execution without CEX-grade balance sheets.
Grvt has been running a step ahead of that trend: negative maker fees as a default, not a promotion. Instead of waiving the fee, it pays users to add liquidity. Most venues that experiment with negative maker rebates cap them around -0.3 basis points, usually reserved for institutional flow. Grvt's baseline extends the same negative structure to retail, across both crypto and RWA markets.
The RWA push
On September 7, Grvt launched a -1bps negative maker rebate for retail users trading RWA perps, running for three months. At -1bps, it's among the most aggressive maker rebates globally, well past what most venues—including institutional tiers—typically offer. On September 20, that's paired with Stable Funding Perps: RWA exposure with predictable funding, USDC settlement, and zero maker and taker fees for retail on that product line. Together, the two make a specific point about where Grvt is positioning itself in the RWA perps market: RWA exposure with either a rebate for providing liquidity or no fee at all, depending on the product.
Why the fee number isn't actually the story
A standalone "cheapest maker fee" claim is a weak pitch, because fee wars are easy to start and easy to lose; whoever cuts deepest today gets undercut tomorrow. The more durable argument is what a negative fee structure is meant to produce: deeper books, tighter spreads, and capital that isn't just sitting idle as margin. That's the compounding case. Negative maker fees attract the liquidity providers who tighten spreads. Tighter spreads and deeper books improve execution for everyone trading on top of that liquidity, across a growing set of RWA markets. And composable capital—collateral that can be deployed as both margin and yield-bearing exposure—changes what "cost of trading" even means once you account for what your capital is doing while it sits there.
None of that erases the basic tension in the maker-rebate model. Someone pays for the rebate, and it's usually the taker, or the exchange's own revenue line, or both. Whether the trade-off holds up depends on whether the deeper liquidity it buys actually sticks around once the promotional period ends. That's the part worth watching once the three-month RWA rebate runs its course.
For context, the broader crypto market is seeing similar dynamics. Ethereum's recent dip toward $2,400 has been met with whale accumulation, while Cardano's slide below $0.20 highlights the fragility of liquidity in thinner markets. Meanwhile, traditional finance is also grappling with fee compression, as seen in Oracle's 14% slide on AI spending fears.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice.
