How to reduce crypto trading fees: four levers, ranked by how much they move

Trading fees are the one cost in your P&L that is fully knowable in advance and almost entirely controllable. They are also the one most traders never touch, because each individual saving looks too small to bother with. The point of this piece is that they multiply.

Here are the four levers, in the order of how much they move the number for a typical active trader, with the trade-off each one carries.

1. Stop paying the taker fee on every entry

On most venues the taker rate is roughly three times the maker rate. Bybit charges 0.020% maker against 0.055% taker; Bitget and Bitunix charge 0.020% against 0.060%. Every market order you place costs about three times what the same trade would have cost as a resting limit order.

You will not get to 100% maker — some entries have to happen now — but moving from all-taker to roughly half maker cuts your blended rate by about a third. That is the single largest saving available to most traders, and it costs nothing except accepting that some orders will not fill.

The trade-off is real: a limit order that never fills is a trade you did not make. If your edge depends on immediate execution, this lever is not for you, and the rest of the list matters more.

2. Get your fees partly refunded

Exchanges pay an affiliate commission on the fees their traders generate. If your account is not attached to an affiliate, the exchange keeps that commission. If it is attached to one that returns the money, a large share of every fee comes back to you in USDT.

This is the only lever on the list that requires no change to how you trade. You pay the same published fee, the same tier applies, the same orders go in. The difference is that a percentage of what you paid arrives back in your balance. On 5,000,000 USDT a month at a 0.055% taker rate, a 40% share is about 13,200 USDT a year.

The cost is a one-time setup: the account has to be created through the affiliate link, because exchanges assign attribution at account creation and will not change it afterwards. What cashback is and where the money comes from covers the mechanism in full.

3. Climb the VIP ladder, if you can actually reach it

Every exchange publishes a tier table that lowers your rate as your 30-day volume rises. The saving is real but the thresholds are higher than most people assume: Binance's first futures tier wants around 15,000,000 USDT of monthly volume, Bybit's around 10,000,000.

Two things worth knowing. First, most exchanges offer an asset-balance route as an alternative to volume — if you keep a large balance on the venue anyway, check whether you already qualify. Second, do not manufacture volume to reach a tier. Trading more to pay a lower rate per trade is a reliable way to pay more in total.

4. Pay fees in the exchange's token

Binance discounts spot fees when you pay in BNB, MEXC does the same with MX, Bybit with MNT. The reductions are typically in the 10 to 25% range depending on venue and market.

This is last on the list deliberately. The saving is a percentage of a percentage, and to collect it you have to hold a volatile asset whose price movement will routinely dwarf the fee saving in both directions. If you were going to hold the token anyway, take the discount. If you were not, this is a position dressed up as a cost saving.

What the stack looks like together

Take a Bybit futures trader at the entry tier paying 0.055% taker. Apply the levers in sequence:

1. 1Half your entries become maker orders. Blended rate falls to roughly 0.0375%.
2. 2Fee cashback at 40% applies to what you pay. Effective rate falls to roughly 0.0225%.
3. 3You reach VIP 1 at 10,000,000 monthly volume. The blended rate under it drops again, to roughly 0.0204%.
4. 4MNT fee payment takes 10% off the futures side. Roughly 0.0184%.

From 0.055% to under 0.019% — about a third of where you started — without changing a single thing about what you trade or when. The first two steps do most of the work and are available to anyone; the last two depend on volume you may not have and a token you may not want.

The one that is not a lever

Moving to a cheaper venue is the reduction everyone reaches for first and it is usually the weakest. The entry-tier taker spread across ten major exchanges runs from 0.040% to 0.080%, so switching buys you at most a factor of two, once, and only if the cheaper venue has books deep enough that you do not give the saving straight back in slippage.

The levers above are multiplicative and stack on whatever venue you are already on. Start there. Compare the venues afterwards, if the numbers still say you should move.