Batcher - Trading Fees

By Jason Ridgway-Taylor

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Since Batcher was released onto Ghostnet, there have been no fees for swapping tokens. All services incur a cost to run for an ecosystem, and Batcher is no different. Whilst this cost will be sized before going to mainnet, it will be composed of oracle costs and ongoing maintenance costs.

The design of Batcher is such that, to clear orders within a given batch, a price must be sourced on-chain. As part of the progress to mainnet, Marigold will be deploying an Oracle solution to source the prices used by Batcher for clearing securely. The cost of running the Oracle and the maintenance of the oracle and contract going forward will be supported by Marigold. As a company, Marigold seeks to build tools and solutions that will benefit the long-term health of the Tezos ecosystem. Batcher is no different in this regard, and whilst Marigold is a core developer on Tezos and receives funding from the Tezos foundation, further into the future, another team/organization might take over the running of Batcher for the ecosystem.

Marigold has decided to add fees to Batcher when swapping tokens to make a future change of ownership as seamless as possible. Whilst Marigold maintains Batcher, these fees WILL BE BURNED. Suppose the maintenance of the contract and oracle move to another team. In that case, it will be possible to redirect these fees to support the maintenance of Batcher to ensure the least disruption to users of Batcher and the broader ecosystem.

Fee cost

It is common for DEXs to charge between 0.1% and 0.3% as an average trading fee based on total trade value. However, Batcher is an uncommon DEX. It does not have liquidity pools that require more significant returns to attract liquidity providers. Thus, the fees charged will purely reflect the cost of the upkeep and maintenance of Batcher.

Fee mechanism

A nominal amount of XTZ will be charged on each trade. Batcher will transfer the fee to a burn address. In line with the governing tenet of transparency in Tezos and the Blockchain ecosystem more widely, both the fee amount and the burn address in receipt of the fees will be visible in the contract storage at any time.
Marigold will maintain an administrator multisig address that can change both the fee and the burn/recipient address after the contract is deployed. This administration is to future-proof Batcher and ensure it stays a part of the Tezos ecosystem for a long time.

Steps to mainnet

Batcher is getting very close to a mainnet launch. The remaining steps to be taken are:

- A robust Oracle:
       - A robust Oracle solution is required to supply secure prices to the Batcher contract to ensure fair and accurate clearing of orders in Batcher.

- Multiple token pools:
       - The Batcher contract and UI will be extended to support various token pools. Batcher was designed to provide deep liquidity to the Tezos ecosystem without requiring liquidity pools. Batcher was also intended to help composability between tokens with deep liquidity. The choice of tokens that Batcher supports is inherently tied to ongoing discussions regarding tokens supported in Liquidity Baking. Our next post on Batcher will explore a deep liquidity use case and how this relates to the LB discussions.

We hope that you are as excited about the upcoming mainnet launch as we are. Please stay tuned for additional posts as we progress to mainnet.

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*Disclaimer:* All investing comes with risk and DeFi is no exception. The following content contains no financial advice.Please do your own thorough research and note that all users funds are traded at their own risk (No reimbursement will be made and Marigold will not assume responsibility for any losses).
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