Trading Fees Deep Dive: Maker vs. Taker and How to Reduce Your Costs
Understand exactly how Cointivo calculates trading fees, the difference between maker and taker, and proven strategies to keep more of your profits.
How Crypto Exchange Fees Work
Every time you execute a trade, you pay a small percentage of the trade value as a fee. On Cointivo, fees depend on two things: your role in the trade (maker or taker) and your 30-day trading volume.
Maker vs. Taker
Maker
You are a maker when your order is placed in the order book and waits to be filled by someone else. Makers add liquidity to the market. This is what happens when you place a limit order that is not immediately filled.
Taker
You are a taker when your order matches immediately against an existing order in the book. Takers remove liquidity. This happens with market orders and limit orders priced to execute immediately.
Makers pay lower fees than takers because exchanges want to incentivise traders to provide liquidity (populated order books attract more users).
Fee Tiers
Cointivo uses a tiered fee structure based on your 30-day spot trading volume. As your volume increases, your fee rate decreases. View your current tier under Account → Fee Schedule.
How Fees Are Calculated
Fee = Trade Value × Fee Rate Trade Value = Price × Quantity
Example: You buy 0.1 BTC at $60,000 = $6,000 trade value. At a 0.1% taker fee: $6.00 fee.
Strategies to Reduce Your Fees
- Use limit orders instead of market orders — pay the lower maker rate whenever execution speed is not critical.
- Increase your 30-day volume — more trading unlocks lower fee tiers.
- Consolidate your trading — spreading volume across multiple exchanges means you never reach higher tiers on any single platform.
- Be mindful of small trades — the fee percentage is the same, but fixed costs (withdrawal fees) make very small trades proportionally expensive.
Other Fees to Know
- Withdrawal fees: A fixed per-withdrawal fee to cover blockchain network costs. These vary by coin and network — TRC20 USDT withdrawals are among the cheapest.
- Convert spread: The Convert feature includes a small spread built into the quoted rate rather than a separate fee line item.
- Deposit fees: Cointivo does not charge for crypto deposits — you only pay the sending network's gas fee.
Fee Impact on Strategy
Fees compound over many trades. A scalper who trades 20 times a day pays fees 20× per day — even at 0.1% per trade, that is 2% of trading capital spent on fees daily, which means you need to profit more than 2% every day just to break even. High-frequency strategies require either very high win rates or access to very low fee tiers.