How it works
Fees and earnings
Two charges per trade, one split between the protocol and the creator and one paid to the creator alone — plus a tax on the opening seconds that exists to make sniping unprofitable.
There are two charges on a trade, and they are independent. The base fee is 1%, always, and it splits between the protocol and the creator. The creator tax is 0–10%, set by the creator when they launch, and it goes to them in full.
Both come off the OKB leg regardless of which way you are trading, so a fee is never denominated in the memecoin and a creator's earnings never depend on the coin they launched holding its value.
The base fee#
| Share | Of the 1% | Goes to |
|---|---|---|
| 30% | 0.30% of the trade | The protocol |
| 70% | 0.70% of the trade | The creator |
On a 1 OKB buy that is 0.01 OKB of fee: 0.003 to the protocol, 0.007 to whoever launched the coin. The split is frozen into each launch at the moment it is created, so a later change to the protocol's terms cannot reach back and reprice a coin that is already trading.
The creator tax#
A creator may add up to 10% on top, charged on every buy and sell of their coin and paid to them entirely — the protocol takes no part of it. It is declared in the launch transaction and cannot be changed afterwards.
It is shown on the coin's page before you trade. A 10% tax is legal here and also obvious, which is the point: the number is on the contract and on the screen rather than buried in a token's transfer function.
Worth knowing
The launchpad caps the creator tax at 10% today, and the contracts cap base fee plus creator tax at 20% combined regardless of what that setting is ever moved to. Most launches set no tax at all.
The opening seconds#
A third charge exists and only ever applies to the first 15 seconds of a launch. A buy landing in the launch second pays 99%; that decays to zero across the window, and after 15 seconds it is gone permanently.
It exists to make sniping unprofitable. A bot that buys a brand-new curve in the same block it was created spends almost its whole budget on fees and gets almost no tokens for it, which is exactly the outcome that makes the strategy not worth running. Sells are never taxed by it.
Two categories of wallet are exempt, both declared inside the launch transaction itself, before anyone else can see the coin exists:
- The creator and their fee recipient, automatically.
- Any wallets the creator names at launch — the sanctioned route for a team bundling its opening buys across several addresses, up to 32 of them.
The tax that a sniper does pay is not burned. It joins the base fee bucket and splits 30/70 like everything else, so it ends up with the protocol and the creator.
Buyback and lock#
A creator can opt in, at launch or afterwards, to putting half of their own share of the base fee into buying their coin back. That is 35% of the 1% — 0.35% of every trade. The protocol's 30% is never touched by it, and neither is the creator tax.
Bought-back tokens are not burned. They go into a vault on a five-year vest, released gradually to the creator over that period. So the buyback is a commitment rather than a supply cut: the tokens come off the market for years, and the creator's own payout is what funds it.
If the curve is too thin for the buyback to execute without moving the price too far, it folds back into the creator's ordinary payout instead of forcing a bad trade.
Claiming
Fees reach a wallet in two hops, and it is worth knowing why, because a creator looking at a full "pending" column and an empty "claimable" one is one transaction away rather than owed nothing.
The escrow pays whoever calls it. There is no recipient argument, so there is no address to type and nothing to send to the wrong place — and it is why the fee screens can be public without the money being.
Creators do all of this at the creator dashboard. One exception: a curve with a buyback earmarked needs a price floor on its sweep, which only the protocol's sweep operator can set, so those are swept for you rather than by you.
The 0.01 OKB launch fee is the one charge that never enters the escrow — it goes straight to the protocol as the coin is created.
After graduation#
The Uniswap v4 pool a coin graduates into charges the same 1% and splits it the same 30/70, through a hook shared by every graduated pool. The creator tax carries across too.
So the economics do not change when a coin crosses over. A creator keeps earning on every swap for as long as the pool trades, and it lands in the same escrow balance the curve fees did — one claim covers both.