Fees

Every charge InVeil makes, in one place. No spreads, no withdrawal fees, no subscriptions, no data sales. If a fee isn't on this page, you don't pay it.

At a glance

The trading commission — the only fee that hits the trade itself

0.2% of the trade amount (20 basis points). The contract enforces a hard cap of 10% — no governance update can push it past that. Today the rate is 0.2%; it was lowered from 0.5% in May 2026.

The commission only applies when value actually moves to the buyer:

• Confirmed receipt — the buyer marks "received" and escrow releases to them.
• Partial settlement — both sides agree to release less than the full amount.
• Buyer-wins dispute — the panel rules in the buyer's favor.

Anything that doesn't move funds to the buyer pays no commission: timeouts, cancellations, seller-wins disputes, mutual cancels. The fee comes off the buyer's side — it's deducted from the seller's escrowed principal before the remainder credits to the buyer, so the buyer nets received − commission.

"Trade amount" is the USDT principal in escrow only. Security stakes, dispute fees, and gas are excluded from the commission base.

The listing fee — 1 USDT per posted offer

A flat 1 USDT is charged when you post a new offer. It exists as anti-spam: without it, an attacker could flood the order book with offers they have no intention of taking. The fee is routed to the protocol treasury and is not refundable, even if the offer expires unfilled or you cancel it yourself.

Taking someone else's offer does not pay a listing fee. Only the act of posting a new offer does.

Security stakes — set by the maker, returned on success

Both sides post a security stake when they engage with a trade. The amounts are set by the offer's maker when posting; takers see them upfront before committing. Stakes serve as skin in the game — a buyer who walks away forfeits their stake to the seller's pool of recoverable funds, a seller who refuses to release pays the same price in reverse.

On a successful settlement, both stakes return in full to the address that posted them. The stake is not the commission and is not a charge — it's collateral against bad behavior, and the contract releases it the moment the trade closes cleanly.

The rules-propose stake — 1 USDT per proposal

Inside the trade room, the Seller writes the rules of the trade — what counts as delivery, what doesn't, anything the Buyer needs to know — and submits them for the Buyer to agree or reject. Each submission locks 1 USDT from the Seller's account as a reflective anti-spam stake. Without it, a Seller could harass the Buyer indefinitely by re-proposing rules every few minutes, forcing the Buyer to spend gas reviewing and rejecting each one.

Where the 1 USDT goes depends on the outcome:

• Buyer agrees — refunded to the Seller in full. The negotiation closed cleanly; the stake served its purpose by gating the proposal.
• Buyer rejects — forfeited to the protocol treasury. The Seller cost the Buyer review gas without converging on a deal; the cost lands on the spammer, not the Buyer.
• Seller overwrites a still-pending proposal — the prior 1 USDT is forfeited to treasury, and a new 1 USDT locks for the replacement. Replace-propose is treated as a self-reject so the Seller can't rapid-fire revisions for free while the Buyer is still reading the previous one.
• Order cancels, times out, or moves into dispute with a proposal still pending — refunded to the Seller. These paths fire for reasons unrelated to rules-spam (the counterparty walked, time ran out, someone escalated), so charging the Seller would create perverse incentives.

This is the same "spammer pays" pattern as the listing fee and the dispute filing fee: every discrete action that can churn another party's gas carries its own discrete cost. Taking someone's offer, agreeing to rules, confirming receipt — none of these pay a stake, because none of them impose review work on the counterparty.

Dispute fees — one flat fee, both sides pay

When a dispute opens, the initiating party pays the 150 USDT filing fee. The other side has 48 hours to either accept the dispute (paying their matching 150 USDT) or let it default to the initiator's ruling.

Every dispute routes to the Senior Arbitration Committee — a fixed three-seat panel. The 300 USDT of pooled filing fees splits cleanly into two halves: the winning party's 150 USDT is returned in full, and the losing party's 150 USDT flows entirely to the protocol treasury. Committee members are not paid per case — service is its own reward (reputation, governance visibility, founding-team accountability). The fee covers the cost of running arbitration at the treasury level, not a per-ruling payout to any individual panelist.

There is no appeal mechanism in v1, and no separate tier-by-tier fee schedule. A single committee ruling resolves the case. Multi-tier arbitration with appeal bonds is part of the Inveil v2 design (see Arbitration) but not part of v1's fee surface.

Cancel penalties — measured in minutes, not USDT

InVeil doesn't charge a USDT penalty for cancelling. We do enforce short cooldowns so cancel-spam can't be used to grief other traders:

• 15-minute cooldown when a taker cancels a public offer they just took. During that window the taker can't take another offer; the public offer re-lists immediately for the next person.
• 30-minute cooldown when an order is cancelled via timeout — i.e. one side stopped responding past the response window.

Cooldowns are per-wallet and don't accumulate. They sit at the maker / taker layer; nothing else (deposits, withdraws, dispute participation) is gated by them.

Gas — paid by you, in ETH on Arbitrum

Every on-chain action — posting, taking, releasing, disputing, voting as a juror — costs gas. Gas is paid in ETH on Arbitrum from your own wallet. There is no paymaster, no gas sponsorship, no hidden top-up: what you spend on gas is what the network charges, full stop.

Arbitrum gas is cheap. A typical action runs in fractions of a cent. A 5-USDT ETH balance covers hundreds of trades. The Fund page shows the current minimum the contract requires for an action to succeed; the app warns you when you're below it.

What InVeil does not charge for

• Depositing and withdrawing. Moving USDT into your TradingVault balance and pulling it back out are free (you pay gas, nothing else).
• Maintaining a balance. No idle-balance fee, no monthly subscription, no minimum balance.
• Reputation, history, or data export. Your trade history is on-chain and readable for free from any explorer.
• Cancelling before a counterparty engages. Pulling an unfilled offer back costs nothing beyond gas — the 1 USDT listing fee paid at post time is the only sunk cost.
• Spreads on internal transfers. When you move USDT between your Wallet and Trading balance, the full amount moves — no skim, no FX, no markup.

Running out of USDT mid-action

Every action above that locks USDT — posting an offer, taking one, proposing rules, opening or responding to a dispute — checks your balance before it fires. If you're short, InVeil pops up a top-up panel showing your wallet's QR code and the exact amount you still need ("Top up 1 USDT to your wallet"). The action stays parked; the panel watches your wallet and auto-resumes the moment the funds land, with no second click and no Face ID re-prompt.

If your USDT is sitting in your Trading balance earning yield rather than in your wallet, the panel offers a one-tap deposit instead — you don't have to manually move it first. Either way, you won't hit a silent transaction failure for being underfunded.

Where the money goes

Commissions, listing fees, and the loser's dispute filing fee all flow to the protocol treasury — a wallet whose address is public and changeable only by governance. Committee members are not paid per case; the dispute pool funds the treasury, not individual panelists.

InVeil's operator does not receive a commission directly. The treasury funds protocol development, audits, and the Senior Committee's operating costs.