Solana trading apps took $417M in fees; Axiom got 48%

01 · One tradeWhat does a Solana trade cost on top of the coin?

Buy a coin in a trading app and the price is not all you pay. The app keeps a small cut. Some trades add a tip to get in faster. And every trade pays a small fee to the network.

Just after midnight UTC on 16 June 2026, a trader used Terminal to buy a new memecoin for 1 SOL on PumpSwap, Pump.fun's exchange. Terminal is a trading app that Pump.fun bought in October 2025, when it was called Padre. SOL is Solana's own coin, worth about $74 that minute. The trade cost the trader 1.015 SOL in all. On top of the coin went a cut for Terminal, a tip and the network fee.

None of that extra went to the pool that sold the coin, a pot of both coins that sets the price. It went to the app and, through the tip and the network fee, mostly to the validator, the computer that put the trade in a block. Bitquery keeps a record of every transfer on Solana. We used it to add up who received what on every trade in the ten months to the end of August 2026.

02 · The playersWho takes a cut of a Solana swap?

A swap on Solana trades one token for another against a pool. The pool takes its own fee, for the people who put money into it and often for the venue that runs it, such as Pump.fun or Raydium. That fee comes out of the trade itself. We leave it aside here.

Many people who trade memecoins go through a trading app: a web terminal such as Axiom or Photon, a Telegram bot such as Trojan or BONKbot, or the swap button in a wallet app such as Phantom. The app builds the trade and sends it. In return it adds one more transfer to the trade, from the trader to a wallet the app owns. That transfer is the app fee.

A validator is one of the computers that take turns building Solana's blocks. Each trade pays it a network fee: 5,000 lamports per signature, of which half is burned, plus an optional priority fee that all goes to the validator, according to Solana's documentation. A lamport is a billionth of a SOL.

A tip is an extra payment to get a trade placed early in a block. Jito, a company whose software many validators run, sells those places in an auction. A tip counts when it reaches one of eight Jito accounts. Jito keeps 3% and passes the rest to the validator and the people who stake with it. The tip can ride inside the trade or in a separate transaction sent with it as a bundle, a set of transactions that run together or not at all. The smallest tip Jito accepts is 1,000 lamports.

Some apps and bots send their trades through a landing service instead, a company that delivers transactions to validators for a fee. The trade then carries a tip to the service's own accounts.

03 · The appsWhich Solana trading apps earn the most in fees?

We matched 25 trading apps to the wallets that collect their fees. Between them they took $417.1 million in fees on 708 million swaps.

Each app sends its fees to wallets of its own. Some use one wallet; Axiom, GMGN and Phantom each went through a dozen or more. We matched them in four ways. Some carry our own address labels. Nine apps trade through a program whose address starts with the app's name, such as troy… for Trojan, BANANA… for Banana Gun and GMgn… for GMGN. Public lists of app fee wallets gave more. For each app we read at least three fee-paying swaps on a public Solana node to check the wallets. Our own TradeWiz investigation had already found that bot's older fee wallet. One wallet we could not tie to any app would rank 15th by swaps. On a sample day in March it took about 40,000 fees, more than 200 per paying wallet on average, which looks more like a trading-bot service than an app people use by hand. Fee wallets we could not name took $12.4 million more, which the totals leave out.

04 · AxiomHow much does Axiom make from fees?

Axiom took 48% of all the fees we matched, $202.0 million. That is more than the next ten apps took together. Axiom is a web terminal for trading new coins, and it charges about 1% a trade.

Axiom's share of the apps' fees moved between 46% in July and 51% in March, and it was the largest app in every full month. Phantom also takes fees in the tokens it swaps, which the dollar totals leave out. Priced at each trade's own rate on one day a week, such fees come to about $16 million over the period, almost all of it Phantom's. Counting them, Axiom's share would be about 47%.

05 · The rateHow much do Axiom, Trojan and other apps charge per trade?

Most of the ten largest apps charge 1% of the trade: 6 of them took almost exactly that on the median day. Phantom, a wallet app, and OKX's router took about 0.85%, and Binance Wallet 0.5%. Fomo works differently. It charges a flat fee in USDC, most often 95 cents, which came to about 1.9% of its median trade.

The median Axiom trade, the one in the middle when a day's trades are lined up by size, was worth about $17 at the minute's SOL price. The fee on it was about 17 cents. What adds up is the number of trades, 353 million through Axiom alone.

06 · The tipsHow much do traders tip Jito on Solana?

Over the same period, traders and bots paid $50.0 million in tips to Jito's eight accounts. The apps' fees were 8.3 times as large. The network fees on the swaps came to $95.0 million more, most of it also for validators.

The money Jito collected each month fell over the period, but only because tips from transactions with no swap fell. Tips paid inside swaps rose 76% from November to August.

The share of swaps with a Jito tip fell too. In November, 23% of swaps had a Jito tip in their own transaction. By August it was 6%.

Over the ten months, 6% of app swaps carried a Jito tip inside the trade, against 10% of other swaps. From April on, the two shares stayed within 2 percentage points of each other, so the gap comes from the earlier months. Most swap tips are tiny, a fraction of a cent.

Counting only the tip inside the trade misses about half of what app users paid Jito. Telegram bots such as Trojan and BONKbot send the tip in a separate transaction, signed by the same wallet and placed right after the swap in the same block, so the two run together as a bundle. Trojan did this on about one in five of its trades. Those separate tips came to $3.1 million, a little more than the $2.9 million paid inside app swaps, and 83% of them came from Trojan and BONKbot users.

07 · Empty tradesWhy do most Jito tips come from transactions with no trade?

Most of the money Jito collected, 67%, came from transactions with no swap in them. We drew random samples of those on two days, one in December and one in June, and read each one on the chain. 226 of 232 moved no tokens at all.

Many of the tipped transactions with no swap were price updates by the market makers behind trading venues such as HumidiFi, Tessera V and ZeroFi, which change their quotes many times a second and pay to go first. Others came from bots that look for a profitable trade, find none and say so in their logs. A smaller part, 9% of the no-swap tip money, was the separate tip an app user sent with their own swap.

08 · Beyond JitoWhere else do trading apps send tips?

App users also paid landing services, outside Jito's accounts. Swaps through the apps paid $38.1 million to landing-service accounts we could prove, 6.4 times the $6.0 million they paid Jito inside the swap or in a separate tip. Nozomi, run by a company called Temporal, and Astralane both publish the accounts that take their tips.

Axiom sent its users' tips to eight accounts whose addresses start with axm; on a sample day, almost every transaction that paid them also paid Axiom's fee. GMGN does the same with ten accounts that start with gmgn. The axm accounts took $30.6 million, and they were emptied into the same wallet that collects Nozomi's own tips. Nozomi says it passes a tip on to the block builder when it routes a trade through one, such as Jito. On Robinhood Chain, Axiom's paid "Priority" option sends its money to a single wallet, which we followed earlier.

09 · Who paysWho pays the most Jito tips?

Jito's tips come from many payers, and a few stand out. The 10 addresses that paid the most sent 10% of all the tips in the period, and the top 100 sent 33%.

We checked the 25 biggest payers against Bitquery's address labels. The second largest is marked as an automated trading bot of Wintermute, a market maker; the four of its tipped transactions we read were all trades through its own program. Two more are marked as MEV bots, programs that profit from the order of trades, and one as a Bybit wallet.

Once the separate tips are counted, trades through the apps paid 12% of Jito's tips. Traders who pay through an app reach validators mainly through the network fee, $57.7 million on app swaps over the period.

10 · The billWhich extra cost is biggest for a trader?

For most trades through an app, the app's cut is the biggest cost beyond the coin itself. On the median Axiom trade the fee was about 17 cents. On four sample days, 15% of app trades paid a tip, to Jito or a landing service, and in 4% the tip was larger than the fee.

The network fee is small too. The pool's own fee, which we left aside, comes out of the price. The apps' cut is the one a trader can compare before they trade: about 1% at most apps, about 0.85% at Phantom and OKX, 0.5% at Binance Wallet, and a flat fee at Fomo.

11 · MethodHow we did this

We used Bitquery's records of every Solana transfer and every swap, from the full-history archive. We matched each transfer to the swap in the same transaction. A swap is a transaction with at least one trade on a pool we track, or a route through Jupiter, DFlow or OKX. The full history of Solana transfers is also sold as files on the Bitquery Data Store, and the same records are available through Bitquery's Solana DEX API.

A tip is native SOL sent to one of Jito's eight tip accounts. We rebuilt those eight addresses from Jito's tip program, checked that the program owns them, and compared them with the list Jito's own servers return. An app fee is any token sent to one of the app's fee wallets, by anyone other than the app itself, in a transaction the app did not sign. Dust under 1,000 lamports was left out as a marker, not a fee, and so were transfers above 10% of the trade's dollar size, unless they were under $2. That set aside $706,128 that does not look like fees.

We checked 113 example swaps one by one on a public Solana node, across 23 apps. Every tip and every fee matched the chain to the lamport. A second check read 441 more fee-paying or tipped swaps, at least three for every app and every tip account we count, and all of them matched. For transactions with a tip and no swap, we drew a random sample on two days and read each one on the chain.

12 · EvidenceAddresses and transactions cited

FAQ

What is a Jito tip on Solana?

A Jito tip is an extra payment in SOL that a trade sends to one of eight Jito accounts to bid for an early place in a block. Jito runs an auction for those places, keeps 3% of the tips and passes the rest to the validator that builds the block and the people who stake with it. The smallest tip it accepts is 1,000 lamports.

How much do Solana trading bots charge?

Most charge about 1% of each trade, added on top of the price as a separate transfer to the app. Most of the ten largest apps took almost exactly that on the median day. Phantom and OKX's swap router took about 0.85%, Binance Wallet 0.5%, and Fomo a flat fee in USDC, most often 95 cents.

How much does Axiom charge per trade?

About 1% of each trade. On the median day Axiom's fee was 1.02% of the trade, and on its median trade of about $17 that came to about 17 cents. Axiom took $202.0 million in fees over the ten months we measured.

Which Solana trading app has the lowest fees?

Among the ten largest Solana trading apps, Binance Wallet charged the least on the median day, 0.5% of the trade. Phantom and OKX's swap router took about 0.85%, and most of the others 1%. Fomo charges a flat fee in USDC, most often 95 cents, so it costs less than 1% only on trades above about $95.

Which Solana trading app earns the most in fees?

Axiom. Over the ten months we measured it took $202.0 million in fees, 48% of everything the trading apps we matched collected, and it was the largest app in every full month.

Do I have to pay a Jito tip to trade on Solana?

No. A tip only helps a trade get placed early in a block. Over our period only 10% of Solana swaps carried a Jito tip in the same transaction as the swap. Some trading bots send the tip in a separate transaction right after the swap, and some apps send it to a landing service instead. Every trade pays the network fee.

What is a Jito bundle?

A Jito bundle is a set of transactions that a validator runs together, in order, or not at all. Some trading bots, such as Trojan and BONKbot, send the swap and the tip as two transactions in one bundle, so the tip does not show up inside the swap itself.

What is a priority fee on Solana?

A priority fee is an optional extra network fee that a trade sets to be processed sooner. It all goes to the validator that builds the block. A Jito tip is a separate payment to Jito's accounts, and a trade can carry both.

Where do landing services like Nozomi send the tips they collect?

Nozomi says that when it routes a trade through a block builder such as Jito, it passes the tip on to that builder. Otherwise, the tip pays for Nozomi's own connections to validators. The tips we traced landed in Nozomi's accounts and were then moved to one collection wallet.