Fees
The 1.56% trading fee, the launch tax in a coin's first moments, how Meteora's 20% comes out first, and where the rest goes.
Every swap on Halo pays a 1.56% fee, collected in SOL, on both buys and sells, at every point on the curve and on the graduated pool. The only exception is the first moments of a coin's life, when a launch tax applies. There is no deploy fee and no fee that depends on trade size.
Launch tax
A coin's fee starts at 50% in its first block and falls in three equal one-slot steps (50%, about 34%, about 18%) to the normal 1.56% from the fourth slot, under a second after launch. The schedule is counted in slots, so its length follows the network's slot time. The tax splits like any other fee: Meteora 20%, the creator 32%, Halo 48%, and Halo's share goes to that coin's burn and the treasury as usual. See First-block pricing.
Where the 1.56% goes
Meteora's DBC protocol takes 20% of every trading fee before anything else, which is set by the program and is not configurable by launchpads. The remaining 80% is split by the configuration's creatorTradingFeePercentage, which Halo sets to 40.
| Recipient | Share of the 1.56% | As a share of trade volume |
|---|---|---|
| Meteora protocol | 20% | 0.3120% |
| Creator of the coin | 32% (40% of the remaining 80%) | 0.4992% |
| Halo | 48% | 0.7488% |
Halo's 0.7488% is then divided by Halo's own policy.
| Halo's share | As a share of trade volume |
|---|---|
| Treasury (buybacks and burns of the main coin) | 0.2500% |
| Burn share: buys back and burns that coin | about 0.4988% |
So the creator receives about 0.5% of a coin's volume, about 0.5% automatically buys that coin back and burns it, and the treasury keeps 0.25% for the main coin. See Buyback and burn. Meteora's 0.312% is why the total is 1.56% where a plain 1.25% fee would stand: it is the amount needed to leave those three shares whole.
A worked example
A trader buys a coin with 10 SOL.
| Item | SOL |
|---|---|
| Fee charged (1.56%) | 0.1560 |
| Meteora protocol | 0.0312 |
| Creator | 0.0499 |
| Treasury | 0.0250 |
| Burn share (buys that coin back and burns it) | 0.0499 |
Over a coin's life, 1,000 SOL of total trading volume generates 15.6 SOL of fees: 3.12 SOL to Meteora, 4.99 SOL to the creator, 2.50 SOL to the treasury and 4.99 SOL spent buying that coin back and burning it.
After graduation
The graduated DAMM v2 pool charges the same 1.56% pool fee, collected in SOL, so the burn share keeps working after graduation. The liquidity position is permanently locked and split between Halo and the coin's creator, so each keeps earning its share of the pool fee after the coin leaves the curve. DAMM v2 applies its own protocol share to pool fees, so Meteora's DAMM v2 rules set the post-graduation split and the 20% figure above applies to the curve only. See Graduation.
How it compares
Pump's fee is 1.25% in total. Halo's is higher by 0.31 percentage points, all of which is Meteora's 20% cut. Halo's choice is to pass nothing of that cut on to the creator, the burn or the treasury: the 0.5% / 0.5% / 0.25% split is what each of them gets net.
Where it is configured
The base fee is a linear fee scheduler: 5000 basis points at the pool's activation slot, falling in 3 steps of 1 slot to 156 basis points, with slot-based activation and no dynamic component, collected in the quote token. The values live in Halo's DBC configuration, are public on chain once the configuration is published, and cannot be changed for a coin that has already launched.