Spot trading & liquidity
How price is set, who supplies the market, and where the fee goes.
Swapping
The spot market is a constant-product pool: it holds USDT on one side and tokens on the other, and the price is simply the ratio between them. Buying takes tokens out and puts USDT in, so the price rises; selling does the reverse. Large trades move the price more than small ones, and how much depends entirely on pool depth.
Providing liquidity
Anyone can deepen a pool by supplying both assets at the current ratio. In return they receive shares recording their portion of the pool, and they earn the largest slice of every swap fee for as long as they stay.
The 0.30% fee
| Share | Recipient | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 0.20% | Liquidity providers | Stays in the pool and compounds |
| 0.05% | Protocol treasury | Also takes 1% of bonding-curve trades |
| 0.05% | Token creator | Accrues forever, claimable any time |
The creator's share is why launching a token is worth doing even with no allocation: income scales with how much the token is actually traded, not with holding it.
The 90-second average
Lending and perpetuals never use the instantaneous pool price, because a single large trade can move it briefly. They use a time-weighted average over 90 seconds, which a manipulator would have to sustain — paying to hold the price away from fair value the whole time — rather than flash for one block.
This averaging is the single most effective protection lenders have: in stress tests, collateral valued at the average price survived crashes that the spot price would have registered as immediate insolvency.