RFQ Perps Explained: What Trading on Carbon Actually Costs

A Perp Venue With No Orderbook

Carbon is the newest venue tracked by LiquidView, and it breaks the mental model most perp traders carry around. Built on the Symmio RFQ (request-for-quote) protocol and settled on Arbitrum, Carbon has no orderbook at all. When you send a market order, a solver — a professional counterparty that hedges your position in the underlying market — fills you at the mark price. There is no book to walk, no depth chart, and no price impact curve. Either the solver accepts your size and you get filled at mark, or the order exceeds the solver's notional cap and it is refused.

That design changes where the cost of trading lives. On an orderbook venue like Hyperliquid, your execution cost is a taker fee plus the slippage you incur walking the book. On Carbon, slippage is structurally zero — the entire cost is a solver fee (the "hedger fee") applied on your notional, in proportion to the mark price, at open and again at close. The Carbon team confirmed to us that these fees are published per market on their public API in decimal format, and they are the real cost of execution — the separate tradingFee field (the platform's own take) is currently zero on all pairs.

The Real Fee Schedule, Straight From the API

We swept all 866 live Carbon markets through their aggregated markets endpoint and grouped them by hedger fee. The schedule is tiered by asset class, and the differences are significant — an alt perp costs almost five times more per side than a major forex pair:

Two details matter when comparing these numbers to orderbook venues. First, the fee is charged twice — once when you open and once when you close — so the round-trip column is the honest number for a complete trade. Second, because the fill happens at mark price, these fees are the whole story: there is no additional spread or slippage stacked on top for any size the solver accepts.

Example: What a $100K Order Actually Costs

Here is a live snapshot comparing the total one-way execution cost (fee + slippage) of a $100,000 market order on Carbon versus Hyperliquid, using LiquidView's standard methodology — orderbook slippage measured as the average of buy and sell versus mid, plus the venue's base taker fee (4.5 bps on Hyperliquid):

The pattern is clear. On liquid crypto majors, deep orderbooks win: Hyperliquid fills $100K of BTC for less than half of Carbon's flat 10 bps. But the flat-fee model shines exactly where orderbooks get thin. On PEPE, book slippage already pushes Hyperliquid past Carbon's flat fee at $100K — and at $500K or $1M, where thin books slip by tens of basis points or simply cannot fill, Carbon still charges the same flat fee as long as the size fits under the solver's cap. The RWA picture is a genuine split decision: tradeXYZ's Growth Mode markets (0.9 bps taker) undercut Carbon on silver, S&P 500 and liquid stocks, while Carbon wins on gold (tradeXYZ runs it in Standard Mode at 9 bps), on EURUSD, and on anything whose HIP-3 book is too thin to absorb the order — AAPL could not fill $100K at measurement time.

• Liquid majors, small-to-mid size: orderbook venues are cheaper — Carbon's 10 bps flat is roughly 2x Hyperliquid's all-in cost.
• Illiquid alts or large size: flat RFQ pricing beats a slipping book; the crossover starts around $100K on the long tail.
• RWA — forex, gold, indices, stocks: a split decision against tradeXYZ on Hyperliquid — Carbon wins on gold, EURUSD and thin-book names, tradeXYZ wins where Growth Mode meets a deep book (silver, S&P 500, NVDA). Carbon's ~200 forex pairs remain mostly exclusive.

How LiquidView Models RFQ Venues

Orderbook venues and RFQ venues need different measurement models, and forcing one into the other produces misleading numbers. For Carbon, our collector reads every market's live solver cap and stores slippage as 0 bps for any order size at or below the cap, and "not executable" above it. The per-market hedger fee is then added on the frontend — the same way we handle taker fees everywhere else — using live values from Carbon's API rather than a hardcoded schedule, so a fee change on their side shows up on LiquidView within five minutes.

This means Carbon's row in the leaderboard is directly comparable to every orderbook venue: the total cost column is fee plus slippage in both cases. The decomposition just differs — on Hyperliquid most of the cost is variable slippage, on Carbon all of it is a fixed, published fee. For traders, that fixedness is itself a feature: your execution cost on Carbon is known before you click, at any size the solver accepts.