Moon.com Fees Explained: What 1000× Leverage Actually Costs

Most betting platforms bury their fee structure three clicks deep and hope you never do the math. Moon.com actually publishes theirs — but the published version leaves out the one cost that matters most. This page puts all of it in one place, with numbers you can check against your own bet slip.

There are three explicit fees on Moon.com and one implicit cost. The explicit ones are an opening fee, a holding fee and a performance fee. The implicit one is the house spread. Sign up through our link and you also get 3.5% of all fees returned as rakeback, active from your first bet — the details are covered in our rakeback guide.

The fee table at a glance

The opening fee: 1%, but of what?

This is the detail that makes Moon interesting for high-leverage bettors. The 1% opening fee is charged on your stake, not on the leveraged exposure. Bet $1,000 at 10× leverage and you control a $10,000 position — but the fee is 1% of $1,000, which is $10. Not $100.

Scale that up and the difference becomes dramatic. At 1000× leverage, a $100 stake controls $100,000 of exposure. The opening fee is $1. A futures exchange charging a typical 0.05% taker fee on notional would charge $50 on the same position — fifty times more. This single design choice is why very high leverage is economically viable on Moon at all.

The holding fee: the one that punishes patience

Every 8 hours your bet remains open, Moon assesses a holding fee. The rate is dynamic — it moves with market volatility, liquidity and funding conditions, and Moon does not publish a fixed percentage. That is a genuine transparency gap: you cannot calculate your carrying cost in advance the way you can on an exchange with published funding rates.

The practical consequence is that Moon is built for short-duration bets. A position held for a week pays 21 separate holding charges. If your thesis needs days to play out, the holding fee stack can consume a meaningful share of your stake before the market ever moves against you.

The performance fee: 10% of what you win

Moon takes a minimum of 10% of your realized profit on winning bets. Losing bets pay nothing — there is no performance fee on a bust. Note the wording: minimum 10%. Moon reserves room to take more, and does not publish when or why the rate would be higher.

This structure is closer to a hedge fund's carry than to an exchange's commission, and it changes how you should think about win rate. A strategy that wins slightly more than it loses on gross P/L can still lose money net, because your winners are taxed 10% and your losers are not subsidised.

The house spread: the cost nobody advertises

This is the important part. Moon's terms of service state that bets settle against Moon's own quoted price, which includes a spread in Moon's favour — on top of every fee listed above. Moon is the counterparty of every bet, and its terms disclose a direct financial interest in the outcome. That is not a scandal; it is the standard model for this product category, and Moon is more upfront about it than most. But it means the advertised fee table is not the full cost.

Worked example: a $100 bet at 100× leverage

Say you stake $100 on Bitcoin going up at 100× leverage, which gives you $10,000 of exposure. Bitcoin rises 0.5%, and you close the bet after two hours.

1. Opening fee: 1% of your $100 stake = $1.00
2. Gross profit: 0.5% of $10,000 exposure = $50.00
3. Holding fee: $0 — you closed within the first 8-hour window
4. Performance fee: 10% of $50 = $5.00
5. Net before spread: $50 − $1 − $5 = $44.00
6. With 3.5% rakeback: $6.00 in fees paid, $0.21 returned

Roughly 12% of your gross profit goes to fees, before the house spread. Flip the example — Bitcoin falls 0.5% instead — and the position is down $50 on a $100 stake, plus the $1 opening fee, with no performance fee owed. Another 0.5% against you and the loss reaches the stake, the bet busts, and the $100 is gone. This asymmetry is the core economics of the product.

How to keep your costs down

• ▸Close inside the 8-hour window whenever your thesis allows — every window crossed is another charge.
• ▸Use the $100,000 play money mode to measure your real fee drag across 20–30 bets before risking capital.
• ▸Sign up through our link so rakeback is active from your first bet.
• ▸Remember that leverage multiplies exposure, not opening cost — raising leverage to chase a bigger position does not raise your entry fee, but it does move your bust price closer.
• ▸Track your own net P/L rather than trusting any headline fee claim, including ours.