Fees You Might Not Notice

Trading a stock token usually involves more than one layer of cost. There's the spread between buy and sell prices on whichever venue you're using, a network fee to actually process the transaction on-chain, and — depending on the venue — a protocol trading fee taken from the trade itself.

Lending markets have their own fee structure, mostly expressed as interest rather than a flat fee. Borrowers pay a variable rate that changes with demand; suppliers earn a share of that rate, with the rest sometimes routed to the protocol itself.

Minting and redeeming tokens directly with the issuer can carry separate costs too — administrative fees or minimum sizes that don't apply when you're just trading the token on the open market.

None of these costs are usually hidden, but they are spread across several places, so it's easy to underestimate the total cost of a round trip — buying, holding, and eventually selling or redeeming — if you only look at the headline trading fee.