Dex Swap Fee Calculator

The headline fee tier on a decentralized exchange is only one of four costs, and on small trades it is rarely the largest. The liquidity provider fee is proportional to trade size: 0.30 percent is the classic Uniswap V2 rate, while Uniswap V3 offers 0.01 percent for stablecoin pairs, 0.05 percent for correlated assets such as ETH and a liquid staking derivative, 0.30 percent for ordinary token pairs and 1.00 percent for illiquid ones. PancakeSwap on BNB Chain settled at 0.25 percent. Gas is the opposite: a swap consumes roughly 120,000 to 200,000 gas units regardless of notional, so at 25 gwei with ether near 3,000 USD the fixed charge of about 9 to 15 USD is 5 percent of a 200 USD trade and 0.1 percent of a 10,000 USD trade. That crossover is what the break-even size output identifies. Slippage and price impact are often conflated but differ. Price impact is deterministic and comes from the constant product invariant: moving along the curve x times y equals k shifts the marginal price, so impact scales with trade size divided by pool depth. Slippage tolerance is a protective bound against price movement between broadcast and inclusion, not a cost that is always incurred. Setting it too tight causes reverts that still burn gas; setting it loose, above roughly 2 to 3 percent on a liquid pair, invites sandwich attacks in which a searcher brackets the transaction. The price impact figure here assumes a fixed 5 million USD pool depth and a V2-style curve, so it understates impact in thin pools and overstates it inside a well-provisioned V3 concentrated range.

Automated market makers replaced order books because order books need active market makers and Ethereum blocks were too slow and too expensive to support them. Vitalik Buterin sketched an on-chain market maker using a constant product invariant in 2016 and 2017 posts, and Hayden Adams implemented the idea as Uniswap V1, deployed in November 2018 with support from an Ethereum Foundation grant. V1 paired every token against ether and charged a flat 0.30 percent to liquidity providers. Uniswap V2 arrived in May 2020 with direct token-to-token pairs and price oracles, and SushiSwap forked that codebase in August 2020, splitting the same 0.30 percent into 0.25 percent for providers and 0.05 percent for the protocol. Uniswap V3, launched in May 2021, introduced concentrated liquidity and with it the multiple fee tiers this calculator compares, since capital confined to a narrow price band needs different compensation depending on how volatile the pair is; the 0.01 percent stablecoin tier was added by governance vote later that year. The cost structure changed again in August 2021 when EIP-1559 replaced first-price gas auctions with a burned base fee plus a priority tip, making fee estimation far more predictable. The rise of MEV extraction over the same period turned slippage tolerance from a convenience setting into a security parameter, and pushed high-frequency swapping onto rollups such as Arbitrum, Optimism and Base, where the fixed gas component falls to cents.