Trade
A swap fills at the quoted price or not at all, and its fee rises when trading turns one-sided or choppy.
Updated Nov 9, 2026
A swap trades one asset of a market for the other, against the market's own reserves. There is no order book to match against and no router to trust: the quote is a simulation of the exact program instruction, and the trade settles at that quote or not at all.
Placing a swap
Pick the pair
On Trade, choose the asset you pay and the asset you receive. If more than one market exists for the pair, the app lists the routes and ranks them by output; you can pick another.
Enter an amount
Type the amount you pay or the amount you want to receive. The app quotes when you enter an amount. After 30 seconds the quote dims as expired; Refresh, or the swap button, takes a fresh one.
Read the breakdown
Exchange rate, price impact, swap fee, slippage tolerance and the minimum you will receive. If price impact is high, the trade is large for this market; splitting it does not help, and a smaller size is the honest fix.
Confirm
Sign in your wallet. The instruction carries your minimum output; if the market moves past your tolerance before the transaction lands, it fails instead of filling badly.
Price impact
Every market has a curve: a constant-product tail that always has some liquidity at every price, and optionally two bands of concentrated depth around a centre that follows the market slowly. Small trades near the centre move the price very little on a concentrated curve; large trades walk out of the bands and into the tail, where impact grows the way it does on any constant-product AMM.
- Constant product
- Concentrated, 8× near the price
- Impact, concentrated
- 1.25%
- Impact, constant product
- 10.00%
The app reports impact as the difference between your average price and the spot price before the trade. It is quoted from the live curve, so it already includes the market's current depth and centre.
What a swap costs
| Component | What it is | Typical size |
|---|---|---|
| Base fee | The market's swap fee, set at launch | 30 bps by default |
| Divergence surcharge | Charged only on trades that push the price outward from the centre, scaled by how far | 0 in calm markets |
| Volatility surcharge | Charged when the market has been chopping back and forth; decays as it calms | 0 in calm markets |
| Launch fee | An optional premium above the base fee on new markets, decaying over hours or days | Creator's choice |
| Token transfer fee | Charged by the token program itself for Token-2022 mints with a transfer fee | Depends on the token |
The Dusk fees together can never exceed half of the trade: the program measures them against your input (or the gross output, if the market collects fees in the output asset) and caps the total at 50%. Token transfer fees sit outside that cap. The quote shows the full amount, so what you see in the breakdown is what leaves your wallet.
Fees are collected in the asset the market creator chose: the input asset, always base, or always quote. A governed share goes to the protocol; the rest belongs to the market's liquidity providers, part compounded into reserves and part held as claimable yield.
Slippage
Slippage tolerance is the gap you accept between the quoted output and the minimum you will take. The default is Auto, which uses 0.5%. Lower it for large stable markets; raise it only when a market is thin and moving.
The tolerance is enforced by the program, not by the app, so a stale quote fails cleanly.
Launch premiums
Markets can start with a temporary fee premium that decays linearly or in sixteen halvings over up to thirty days, or that steps down as the launch asset's price crosses milestones. A directional size premium can also price a single large buy while the launch limiter is active; because that premium is stateless across transactions, the program refuses multiple swap-like actions on the same market in one transaction while it is on. The market page shows the current effective fee.
Reading a market before you trade
The market page shows the live price, the smoothed prices the market uses for risk, the reserves on each side, the current fee, and recent trades. The virtual order book on the leverage page renders the same curve as depth at each price, which is the fastest way to see how much size a market can take.
Related
- The curve and fees: how the bands, the centre and each fee are defined.
- Leverage: the same swap machinery with borrowed size.
- Developers: reading state and quotes for
preview_swap.