FUNDING, FEES, AND RISK CARRY

Every fee or carry component in Dexter is computed inside the engine — the accounting layer reconciles totals later, but the numbers below all originate from the same ordered state advance that settled the underlying fill.

#How funding enters the ledger

Funding in Dexter settles every 8 hours per market. The engine measures directional imbalance — open-interest skew between longs and shorts — continuously, computes the funding rate against a clamped band, and at each 8h boundary advances fundingAccrued for every account holding inventory in that market. The side that pays is the crowded side: longs pay shorts when longs dominate open interest; shorts pay longs when shorts dominate. The rate clamp keeps a single window from producing pathological numbers during a transient skew spike.

Above $1K of net funding paid by an account in a single 8h window, a 1% admin fee is routed to protocol-owned reserves; smaller windows pass through gross. That cut exists so the bulk of carry remains a peer-to-peer transfer between traders on opposite sides of the book, while concentrated outsized payers contribute a small share to the insurance and treasury layer that absorbs their stress when it materializes. Because funding is a runtime state advance and not a reporting artifact, an account's equity reflects the carry by the time the 8h boundary closes — there is no lag between the rate publication and the deduction.

#How fees become protocol-owned value

Maker and taker fees are created the moment a fill is accepted. The 0.020% maker / 0.060% taker rate is applied to the notional inside the same state transition that moves position size, entry basis, realized PnL, and account cash — there is no separate "fee post" step that could disagree with the fill. Resting maker contribution earns the -0.005% rebate against the taker that crossed it; if you held DXTR stake at one of the published tiers, the -10% / -20% / -30% taker discount lands at the cashier reconciliation, not on each individual fill.

A later reconciliation path converts the engine's fee, funding-admin, and liquidation-fee totals into on-chain movements: protocol-owned fee balances, insurance top-up, and treasury allocations. The split between the matching engine and the finance layer is deliberate. The engine owns when and how carry and fees arise; the treasury path owns how those protocol-owned balances later settle into the vault. Both layers see the same numbers because both layers read from the same ordered state.

 trade executes
   -> taker pays 0.060% notional, maker rebated -0.005% on resting contribution
   -> skew-adjusted taker surcharge applied based on book imbalance
   -> fundingAccrued advances at next 8h boundary; 1% admin cut above $1K/window
   -> DXTR stake tier discount applied nightly at cashier
   -> reconciler converts protocol deltas into vault fee, insurance, treasury movements

#Why carry belongs in the engine

If funding, the skew-adjusted taker surcharge, and the liquidation fee were treated as reporting artifacts settled out of band, a venue could publish a clean dashboard while its actual carry drifted underneath. Dexter writes all three into the same ordered state advance as the underlying fill, so the market's visible posture, an account's equity, and protocol-owned reserve balances always derive from the same transition. The funded trader sees the same fee an auditor reconstructs from the chain — and the rate that hits the leaderboard is the rate that hit the wallet.

#What this costs a funded trader

• Fee schedule. 0.020% maker / 0.060% taker on notional. A $50K round-trip at taker on both sides costs $60. The fee lands inside the same fill transition, so a position that goes through and reverses inside one block pays both legs without any out-of-band reconciliation.
• Funding cadence. Every 8 hours per market. The rate publishes ahead of the boundary; the deduction lands on fundingAccrued at the boundary itself. Above $1K of funding paid in a single window, a 1% admin cut routes to insurance — smaller windows pass through gross.
• Skew-adjusted taker. The published 0.060% rate is the floor. A long taker into a 90/10 long-heavy book pays an explicit surcharge on top; a long taker that flattens that skew pays at or near the floor. Fighting the skew compounds: higher taker, higher funding paid by the crowded side, lower fill quality at the inventory cap.
• Maker rebate. Resting maker contribution earns -0.005% on the notional it crossed. On a thin attempt, designing entries that rest rather than take saves 0.065% per round-trip — a meaningful edge for higher-frequency strategies running into the same +10% target.
• DXTR stake discount. Staked DXTR moves the taker rate down by 10% / 20% / 30% at the 1K / 5K / 25K tiers. The discount is computed nightly from the on-chain stake snapshot and applied at the cashier reconciliation — it is not retroactive on intraday fills, but compounds across the 30-day window.
• Liquidation fee. A forced close attaches an explicit liquidation fee on top of the realized loss. The fee splits 50% to the keeper that triggered the close and 50% to insurance after any bad-debt offset. Size positions so liquidation fee + realized loss never crosses the -4% daily or -8% total drawdown floor — once liquidated, the rule break is automatic.

Concrete cost model: a 5x notional trader doing 4 round-trips per day on a $10K allocation pays roughly $24/day in taker fees ($10K × 5 × 4 trips × 0.0006 × 2 sides). Across 30 days that is about $720 of pure fee drag — 7.2% of allocation — before funding, before skew surcharges, and before any liquidation fee. A 1K DXTR stake brings that to $648, a 5K stake to $576, a 25K stake to $504. The +10% target assumes those costs are inside the strategy, not stacked on top of it; the discount tiers are how a high-frequency challenge run claws back its edge.