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Fee Flow

This page traces a fee from the moment a user swaps to the moment ATOM is staked.

1. Fee Collection

When a user swaps through the Atom Circuit frontend, the swap is routed through Skip Go, which finds the best route across DEXes and bridges. A 0.50% fee is taken from the tokens the user receives.

Skip Go takes a revenue share from this fee. The remainder goes to Atom Circuit.

graph LR
    A[User swaps tokens] --> B[Skip Go]
    B --> C[User receives ~99.50%]
    B --> D[Skip takes their share]
    B --> E[Atom Circuit receives the rest]

The user always pays the same 0.50% fee. The split between Skip and Atom Circuit is handled behind the scenes.

Supported Chains

Swaps are supported on any chain that Skip Go routes through, including Cosmos chains and EVM chains.

2. Referral Tracking

After a swap completes, the system records which validator's referral link the user came through, linking the fee to that validator.

3. Conversion

Collected fees are converted to ATOM approximately every 30 minutes:

graph LR
    A[Fees on various chains] --> B[Converted to ATOM] --> C[ATOM on Cosmos Hub]

Very small balances are skipped until they accumulate to a meaningful amount.

4. Distribution

After conversion to ATOM, fees are distributed to the staking contract based on referral data:

  • Referred fees - each validator receives a share proportional to the swap volume their referral link generated
  • General pool (swaps without a referral) - split equally among all active validators
  • All distributions are sent as a single transaction - if any part fails, nothing is distributed and the system retries later

5. Staking

After fees arrive at the staking contract, pending ATOM is delegated to validators:

  • Each validator with at least 0.5 ATOM pending gets a delegation
  • The contract checks each validator's status before delegating - jailed or unbonded validators are skipped
  • All delegations are recorded on-chain

Timing

Step Frequency
Fee collection Instant (during swap)
Referral tracking Instant (after swap)
Conversion + distribution Approximately every 30 minutes (automated)
Staking Approximately every 30 minutes (automated)