The issuer of OpenAI and Anthropic tokens has swept up $2.2M in fees. And it has cut the fee from 5% to 1%

01 · What a buyer seesPay for one token and less than one arrives

Buy $100 of the OpenAI token on Solana today and $99 of it arrives. Sell it straight back and you get about $98. Over the weekend the same buy delivered $95, and the round trip left about $90.

No exchange took the difference and no wallet app took it. The token took it. On 9 September the same round trip lost nothing. Then the fee rose four times in 23 days, to 5%. It stayed there for 64 hours and then dropped to 1%.

The token comes from PreStocks, a company that issues tokens meant to follow the share price of private firms such as OpenAI, Anthropic and SpaceX. They trade on Solana DEXs like any other coin. Bitquery indexes every Solana trade, so we read each change to the fee from the account that made it and measured what real trades lost. Then we followed the money the account collected.

02 · What these tokens areA price tracker with no share in your name

A PreStocks token is not a share. The company's site says holders get exposure to the price and no ownership, vote or dividend. It says each one is backed by a holding entity that is invested in the company, and that its price stands for the price of one share. On 5 October the Anthropic token's median trade price was $1,076 and the OpenAI one's $1,495.

Neither OpenAI nor Anthropic is listed on a stock exchange, so for someone who wants OpenAI stock or Anthropic stock before an IPO, tokens like these are sold as the closest thing. The two firms are not part of it. In May, Anthropic said any transfer of its shares to that kind of holding entity is void, and OpenAI gave a similar warning, CoinDesk reported. PreStocks' versions of both fell by more than a third that week.

They kept trading. In the month to 1 October the pair did $136 million of trades on Solana DEXs, a big number in a market where most stock-token trades are small. Since the fee began, every one of those trades has paid a toll. PreStocks' own page counts about 48,000 holders of the OpenAI token.

03 · Where the fee livesThe rate is a setting inside the token

Solana's newer token standard, Token-2022, lets an issuer write a transfer fee into a token. Once it is set, the network holds back that share of every transfer, whoever sends it and wherever it goes. A wallet pays it. So does a DEX pool. What is held back waits in the receiving account until the issuer collects it.

A swap moves the token once, from the pool to the buyer or from the seller to the pool. So a plain buy loses 1% today, and a plain sell loses 1% again. Do both and you are down 1.99% with the price exactly where it started. While the 5% rate applied, the same round trip cost 9.75%.

Some transactions pay twice in one go. They take the token in from one pool and send it straight out to another, without keeping any. Arbitrage bots trade like this, and so do swap routers. We pulled 419 random transactions in the two tokens from the days the rate was 3%. In 368 of them the token came in and went straight out again, and the fee was taken twice. The wallet that signed kept none of it in all but one. Only 50 paid once.

There is no cap. On every PreStocks token the upper limit on the fee is set to the largest number the setting can hold.

04 · The scheduleFour steps up in 23 days, then one down

The first fee arrived on the morning of 10 September, at 0.5%. Every trade we sampled before that hour came through whole, on all four tokens we tested. On the evening of 20 September the rate doubled, and on the 26th it tripled. The fourth step, to 5%, began late on 2 October.

Each change shows up twice on the chain. First the account that controls the tokens sends an order. The new rate then starts at a fixed point in Solana's calendar, which came about a day and a half later each time. That account had set no fee at all before 8 September, as far back as its first transaction in July 2025.

The 5% rate did not last. On the afternoon of 3 October, less than a day after it began, the account ordered both tokens back to 3%. Four hours later it changed that order to 1%, and sent the same 1% to five other PreStocks tokens. The 3% never took effect. The 1% rate began on the afternoon of 5 October.

Each dot in the chart is one real swap, and every dot sits on one of the two lines. In all 217 swaps we measured after 2 October, the token lost exactly the rate in force, once or twice.

The tokens did not all move together. The SpaceX one stopped at 1% and the xAI one went back to zero. Today the other seven charge 1%. Tessera, a rival issuer, charges 0.2% on its own OpenAI token and did not change it.

Other stock tokens on Solana work without any of this. The xStocks and Backpack tokens we checked have no transfer fee set at all.

05 · Who collectsOne account sets the fee and takes it

A single account holds every control on these tokens. It can change the fee and collect it. It can also mint new ones, freeze a wallet, pause all transfers, and pull them out of any wallet without the holder signing. Solana calls that last power a permanent delegate. The account is a multisig, one that needs more than one key before it acts.

PreStocks tells users this in its terms. They were last updated on 8 September, two days before the first fee. They say a fee may be built into a token and taken from every transfer, on any exchange or between a user's own wallets, and that the company may change it at any time without notice. One line says it is "not obliged to publish" a fee or a change to one. The agreement shown to visitors adds that holdings may be frozen, moved or burned. Its FAQ says such fees help cover the cost of buying and selling. We found no rate in the terms, in the FAQ or on the OpenAI token's page, when we read them on 2 October and again on 6 October.

The fees do not reach the account by themselves. Each one waits in the account that received the token until someone sweeps it up. The issuer's account did that ten times in less than four weeks. At each day's prices the sweeps came to about $2.2 million, $1.4 million of it from the Anthropic token and most of the rest from the OpenAI one. The biggest came on 5 October, right after the 5% days: about $765,000.

PreStocks' ecosystem page lists RevShare, and the page's own description of it says that with RevShare's tools "transfer fees from every transaction are distributed to token holders." We found no payout to holders in the account's record. Fees left it twice. On 22 September it passed on everything it had swept from four of the tokens, then worth about $416,000, to a second multisig, which sent it all to one wallet the next day. On 6 October it sent its Figure AI fees straight to that wallet. The wallet also receives newly minted PreStocks tokens and trades them on DEXs. The rest, fee tokens worth about $1.8 million at 5 October prices, was still in the account on 6 October.

These are the amounts we can see. Fees still waiting in holders' accounts are in none of them.

06 · What traders didTrading thinned out, and a cheaper rival filled up

While there was no fee, a median day saw $1.7 million of trades in the PreStocks OpenAI token. Under the 3% rate it was $1.1 million. The Anthropic one dropped by about the same share.

A rival went the other way. Tessera's OpenAI token was a small market in early September, with about a third of a million dollars of trades on a median day. Once the PreStocks rate reached 3%, it was doing 11 times as much.

Day by day the switch is easy to see. Until the 3% rate began, the rival was the smaller market on most days. It was the bigger one on every day after that, through 5 October.

The chain shows the timing and says nothing about the reason. Both rose in price through September, the rival faster, and a rising price pulls in traders by itself. The two also come from different issuers, so nothing ties one to the other. What the record does show is trading growing in the cheaper of the two over the same weeks that it shrank in the dearer. And most of the trading in the PreStocks tokens, as the sample showed, is the kind that pays twice.

The 5% days tell us less. From the 3% weeks to those three days, trading on a median day fell 87% in the PreStocks OpenAI token and 85% in Tessera's, so the two dropped together. The 1% rate is too new to judge.

Someone who bought the OpenAI token on 9 September paid no fee to get in. Getting out today costs 1%, and over the weekend it cost 5%. The next rate sits where all of these did, inside the token, where one account can change it.

07 · How we checkedMethod

The fee rate is public. It sits in each token's settings, where anyone can read it, and every change is a transaction from the controlling account. We decoded all of that account's transactions, back to its first. To see what was charged, we took swaps from our DEX trade data, one per token per day where we could, then 419 more at random at the 3% rate and 217 after 2 October, and compared the amount sent with the amount received. Dollar values use each day's median trade price.

The same checks can be run with the Bitquery MCP.

08 · The recordTokens, accounts and transactions behind this story

FAQ

Do PreStocks tokens have a transfer fee?

Yes. Every PreStocks token we tested began holding back part of each transfer on 10 September. The fee is a setting inside the token, so it applies to wallets and DEX pools alike.

How much is the fee on the OpenAI and Anthropic tokens?

1% of every transfer, since 5 October. Before that it was 5% for less than three days, and 3% before that. Early in September there was none. A buy and a sell each pay it, so getting in and out costs about 2% now.

Why did the fee go from 5% back to 1%?

The chain records when the cut was ordered, late on 3 October, by the issuer's own account. It records no reason. We found no announcement of the cut on PreStocks' site.

What do the OpenAI and Anthropic stock tokens cost?

On 5 October the median trade on Solana DEXs was $1,076 for PreStocks' Anthropic token and $1,495 for its OpenAI token. PreStocks says the price stands for the gross price of one share. A token is not a share, and every transfer of it loses 1% to the fee.

Can the fee change again?

Yes. One multisig account can set a new rate on any PreStocks token, and there is no cap. PreStocks' terms say fees may change at any time without notice.

Is a PreStocks token a share of OpenAI or Anthropic?

No. PreStocks' site says the tokens give exposure to the price and no ownership, vote or dividend. In May 2026 Anthropic said transfers of its shares to holding entities of this kind are void, and OpenAI gave a similar warning.

Who receives the fee?

The issuer's own account, a multisig. It has swept up about $2.2 million of fees since mid-September. It passed about $431,000 of that to one wallet that trades on DEXs and kept the rest. We found no payout to holders.