Maker/Taker Fee
Maker and taker fees are the two-tiered pricing model order-book exchanges use: a lower fee for orders that add liquidity, a higher one for orders that remove it.
A maker fee is what an order-book exchange charges when your order adds liquidity by sitting on the book until someone else fills it, while a taker fee is what it charges when your order removes liquidity by filling immediately against an order that's already there.
The distinction comes down to order type. A limit order placed away from the current market price doesn't execute right away — it "makes" the market by giving other traders something to trade against, so exchanges reward that with a lower fee, sometimes even a rebate. A market order, or a limit order priced to fill instantly, "takes" liquidity that's already sitting on the book, and pays a higher fee for the convenience of immediate execution. On most order-book exchanges, maker fees run roughly 0–0.10% and taker fees roughly 0.05–0.15%, though exact tiers vary by exchange and by your trailing volume.
This two-tier structure matters because it's easy to miss if you're used to a single flat trading fee. A trader who only ever uses market orders is quietly paying the higher taker rate on every trade, while someone willing to place resting limit orders and wait for a fill can trade the same volume for less — the tradeoff is speed and certainty of execution versus cost.
Zest isn't an order-book exchange, so maker/taker fees don't apply to swaps here — there's no book to add to or take from. Instead, each swap gets a single quoted rate from an exchange partner providing the liquidity for that pair, with any cost already built into the rate itself as the spread rather than split into separate maker and taker charges. You choose between a fixed-rate order, which locks that rate for a short window, or a floating-rate order, which keeps tracking the market until your deposit is processed — see fixed vs. floating rate for how that choice plays out. Neither option rewards you for "waiting" the way a maker order does; the rate is the rate you're quoted, not something that improves if you sit still.
Knowing how maker/taker pricing works is still useful context if you also trade on order-book exchanges, since it explains why the fee you see at order entry can differ from the fee you actually pay once the trade fills — and why two traders moving identical size can end up with different costs depending on order type, not just slippage from a moving market.