Axiom fees: what one trade costs and how to fund it

I went through John Cook's follow-up on trading memecoins on Axiom, published on July 14, 2026. The part I would replay is the fee panel. Axiom fees come from a handful of settings hidden inside a trade preset, and the creator says a few edits take the cost of a buy or sell from about a dollar to about a penny. He also shows how to move SOL from Phantom into USDC, what one $1 round trip actually cost, and how to get a little SOL back from the network afterwards.

Axiom fees: what the panel actually controls

Axiom is a web trading terminal for Solana tokens. It is non-custodial: you connect a wallet such as Phantom and the coins stay there while the terminal builds transactions for you to approve. Type the address yourself and check it reads axiom.trade before you connect anything. Copycat sites that look like a popular terminal are a routine way wallets get drained, and a signature you gave to the wrong address cannot be taken back.

Account creation is covered in our Axiom setup guide; this piece picks up at the part of the screen that decides what each trade costs.

At the top of the trade panel sits a preset selector. It shows P1, the first saved preset, and it carries separate values for buys and for sells. Four settings inside it decide both the cost of a trade and whether the order lands at all: slippage, priority fee, bribe and MEV protection.

Slippage is the maximum price move you accept between clicking buy and the order filling. Set it too tight and the trade fails on a small wobble; set it too wide and you accept a much worse price. The priority fee is a tip paid in SOL to the validator that puts your transaction in a block, and a bigger tip usually means faster inclusion when the network is busy. The bribe is a second tip field Axiom shows next to it. MEV protection changes how the order is routed so bots have a harder time trading ahead of you, a practice called sandwiching.

Two of these are fixed tips paid per attempt. The other two change the price you get. That split matters on a small account, because only the tips respond to the preset.

The buy and sell preset the creator uses

The default settings were not built for a beginner with $20, so the preset he walks through looks like this.

Adding zeroes to a decimal field makes the value smaller, so two extra zeroes make a figure 100 times lower. In his summary he says to aim for four zeroes on the priority fee and three on the bribe. That is his shorthand for the size of the numbers, not a fee quote from Axiom.

He calls the 40% sell slippage crazy and brings it down to about 10. On the buy side he uses 7% or 8%, which he says is fine for the beginner strategy he teaches, buying coins that already look dead. If orders stop going through, his advice is to raise the slippage or nudge the bribe up, for example to two, until they do. "You definitely don't want to be getting eaten up by the fees," he says, and that is the argument for the lower tips.

The buy and sell lists are separate. Fix the buy side, watch one happy transaction, and the sell tab can still hold the old 40%.

Why a penny a trade changes the math

His own example is the clearest way to see it. "If you're making 100 trades, that's a dollar," he says of the penny setting. At the roughly one dollar per trade he found on the defaults, the same 100 trades cost about $100, which is five times the balance he started with.

On a $5 order, a penny is 0.2% and a dollar is 20%. That turns a small position into a losing one before the token moves at all. The settings matter more the less you have to trade with, which is the case the creator is arguing.

Axiom's percentage commission and the platform's exact default fee values are not spelled out, so read the fee breakdown the platform shows before you size a trade.

I would keep two ideas apart here. The preset controls the tips you pay per attempt. It does not control the commission the platform takes, the launchpad fee on the token, or the price of the token itself, and on a small trade those make up most of the bill.

SOL or USDC: what each balance is for

The creator funds the wallet with about $20 and describes that as about as much as he plans to send for the trading challenge he mentions in passing. At $77 per SOL, $20 is 0.26 SOL. He works through smaller sizes too: 0.01 SOL is about $0.70, 0.1 SOL about $7.70, and a whole SOL is $77.

Trading in SOL means doing that conversion on every order, and the numbers in the example show how easy it is to slip a decimal. USDC is a stablecoin pegged to the dollar, so an order sized in USDC reads as dollars and the balance stops swinging with the price of SOL.

The order box has a toggle for the two. In USDC mode the quick amounts read $25, $50, $100 and $200, and he changes them to $2, $5, $10 and $20 and adds a custom size such as $1.50 for small buys. Keeping the numbers small is deliberate: the point of the first trade is to measure cost, not to make money.

You still need SOL in the wallet. Gas is the network fee, it is paid in SOL whatever you trade in, and a wallet with none left cannot send a sell order. Spend every last fraction on a token and you can be left holding a position you cannot exit.

Moving SOL from Phantom into USDC

The swap happens on Jupiter at jup.ag, a DEX aggregator that splits your order across several Solana exchanges to find a route. These are the steps.

1. Open jup.ag in the browser where your Phantom extension is installed.
2. Click Connect wallet and choose Phantom. If the site offers its own wallet instead, continue to Phantom rather than signing up for a new one.
3. Approve the connection in the Phantom popup.
4. Put SOL in the top field and USDC in the bottom one, so you are selling SOL for USDC.
5. Type 0.2 SOL, which the site values at about $15.
6. Click Swap, check the amounts on the confirmation, then confirm the transaction in Phantom.
7. Look at the wallet afterwards: it keeps about $4 of SOL for gas and holds about $15.50 of USDC.
8. Go back to Axiom, click the USDC balance, and the order sizes switch to dollars.

Two habits matter more than any setting. Keep a slice of SOL untouched, because gas is not optional, and start with a swap smaller than you think you need. Once one swap confirms and appears in the wallet, the rest is repetition.

If you are setting up an account to follow along, this site's referral link is axiom.trade/@code20. It is this site's referral link, and the site may earn a share of the fees of people who join through it.

What one $1 trade cost on Gemini Spark

For the worked example he buys $1 of a token the chart labels GS (Gemini Spark) on Pump V1, a Pump.fun venue. His reason is on the chart: 99.97% of the supply sits inside the liquidity pool. A liquidity pool is the pot of tokens and SOL that a market trades against, so his reading is that almost nobody holds the token outside the pool and there is no holder left to sell into his buy. He says plainly that the coin is dead and the trade is only an example.

That reading assumes the pool figure tells you about every holder, which a single chart number cannot do on its own. A pool that holds nearly everything can also mean nobody wants the token, which is the reason a seller can struggle to find a bid when the time comes.

The trade itself is quick. He buys $1 at preset one, goes to sell, sets 100%, checks the preset is still P1, and the sell preview shows $0.95. Five cents between the buy and the sell is about 5% of the position on a single round trip.

The recorded cost after the sale is messier than the preview. A figure of about $0.24 appears, he questions why it was so expensive, then corrects himself: the USDC balance had dropped by $0.05, and he guesses the rest came out of his SOL. The numbers do not line up neatly, and I would treat the $0.05 from the dollar balance as the number to watch rather than the $0.24.

The gap between a penny in tips and a nickel on a one dollar trade comes from Axiom's own cut and PumpFun's fees, he says. Fees are everywhere. That is where the percentage charges live. The tips are fixed per attempt, so they vanish inside a larger order, while a commission scales with the size of the trade.

Getting SOL back with Sol Incinerator

Every token you touch on Solana can leave a small token account behind, and the network holds a refundable deposit, called rent, to keep that account open. Sell the token and the account usually stays, still holding the deposit, until something closes it. That is the SOL the creator goes looking for at sol-incinerator.com, a third-party site that finds empty accounts and closes them.

1. Open sol-incinerator.com in the same browser as your trading wallet.
2. Connect the wallet and approve the connection.
3. Look at the reclaimable items it lists. In this example those are SOL from empty accounts and Pump Rewards.
4. Select the items you want to close and claim them.
5. Confirm the transaction in your wallet.
6. Check the wallet balance afterwards to see what came back.

The balance moves from $18.91 to $19.21, about $0.30. That is a small refund, and it grows with the number of tokens you have traded, which is why the creator describes it as a top-up for a wallet that is running low rather than a strategy. He also warns against overtrading just to reclaim $0.15, which is the right instinct.

I would add one caution. This is a separate site asking for a wallet connection, so check the address character by character, connect only the wallet you trade with, and remember that every connection is a permission you have granted. A tool that closes empty accounts has no reason to ask for a seed phrase.

Where the risks sit

Memecoins on a launchpad are the riskiest corner of Solana. A token with almost all of its supply in one pool can be bought easily and sold with difficulty, and the price impact on a tiny order can be larger than any fee discussed here. The 99.97% figure is one signal from one chart, not a safety check.

Failed transactions are not free. A transaction that fails on-chain still pays its network fee, which is why the creator's fallback is to raise the slippage or the bribe rather than click buy again unchanged. Both fixes buy certainty with money: a wider slippage setting means a worse fill when the price is moving.

Axiom holds nothing for you. There is no support line that can reverse a trade, no password reset for a stolen signature, and no way back from a seed phrase typed into a fake site. Axiom does not need your seed phrase or private key, and neither does Phantom, Jupiter or any other legitimate tool. If a page asks for either, close the tab.

Percentage fees are the part that scales. A round trip that costs about 5% on a $1 position costs about 5% on a $100 position, and no preset changes that. The tips are the only part of the bill the settings can shrink.

What to check before you size a trade

Write down the values on both tabs, buy and sell, before your first order. The sell side is where the old settings hide, and it is the side that decides whether you can get out.

Then make one small round trip and compare the buy price with the sell preview. The difference is your all-in cost with the platform and launchpad fees included, and it is a better number to remember than the advertised penny. Size the next trade with that figure in mind rather than the one in the settings panel.

Keep a slice of SOL for gas, keep the USDC toggle in dollar mode until the conversions feel natural, and check the address bar every time before you sign. A $1 order is enough to show the gap between the penny in tips and the $0.05 that left the dollar balance.