The Arena ties Arena Perps fee discounts to trading volume and platform status

In Brief:

• The Arena (official site) is rolling out tiered fee discounts on Arena Perps, starting with a 2.5% cut for traders who clear more than $10,000 in volume.
• Discounts key off three inputs: a user’s status on the platform, customer loyalty and volume traded.
• Arena Perps routes order flow to Hyperliquid and earns through a builder code, which caps perp builder fees at 0.1% and bounds what Arena can rebate.

The Arena is cutting perpetuals trading fees for its heaviest users, tying the size of the discount to how much they trade and how long they’ve been around.

The schedule opens at Tier 1: a 2.5% discount on fees for trading over $10,000. Higher tiers follow.

“We are implementing a program to reduce fees based on your status on the platform, your customer loyalty, and the volume that you trade,” The Arena said in announcing the program.

That’s three separate inputs, which sets the ladder apart from the volume-only tiers most perp venues run.

What the discount actually discounts

Arena Perps doesn’t run its own matching engine. Flow goes to Hyperliquid L1, and Arena collects through a builder code, the mechanism that pays a frontend a cut of every fill it sends.

Builder fees are set per order and capped at 0.1% on perps and 1% on spot. Users approve a maximum builder fee and can revoke it at any time. Builders need at least 100 USDC in perps account value to collect anything.

So the ceiling is fixed. Whatever Arena gives back comes out of a fee that can’t exceed 10 bps to begin with, sitting on top of Hyperliquid’s own rates of 0.045% taker and 0.015% maker at Tier 0.

Hyperliquid already discounts on its side. Its tiers run off rolling 14-day volume, assessed at the end of each UTC day, with spot counting double in the weighted calculation. Arena’s program stacks on that.

The volume it applies to

Arena Perps is small next to the venue it feeds. DefiLlama tracks roughly $14.28 million in Arena perp volume over 30 days, $975,000 over seven days and $182,000 in 24 hours. Cumulative perp volume is $164.18 million.

Perps are one of four fee lines DefiLlama tracks for Arena. The others are SocialFi protocol, creator and referral fees, the DEX’s swap fees and Arena Launch.

Builder codes have turned into real revenue elsewhere. Hundreds of developers use them, including MetaMask, Phantom (official site) and VALR, generating about $90 million so far according to Flowscan. Roughly 40% of Hyperliquid’s daily active users now trade through third-party frontends.

Background

Arena launched in late 2023 as Stars Arena, a Friend.tech variant on Avalanche and the first SocialFi app to add a public social feed. Its core product is Tickets, tradable claims on a user’s relevance that carry access to that creator’s content. Secondary ticket trades incur up to a 10% fee, with up to 70% of it streaming to the creator.

An Oct. 7, 2023 reentrancy exploit drained nearly $3 million in AVAX. DefiLlama puts the loss at $2.9 million. A new team acquired the project and rebuilt it.

The Arena raised $2 million in a pre-seed round on Oct. 15, 2024 from Blizzard Fund, Abstract Ventures, D1 Capital, C Squared, Sarson Funds and Alpha Crypto.

ARENA, the governance token, has a total supply of 10 billion. It trades near $0.0007, a market cap of about $3.15 million and a fully diluted valuation of $6.71 million, down from an all-time high of $0.027.