##### [BitShares fees, the Fee Schedule and DEX profitability](https://steemit.com/bitshares/@clockwork/bitshares-fees-the-fee-schedule-and-dex-profitability)
_Suggested Duration: 10 to 20 minutes_

Clockwork has analyzed the net flow of BTS fees through the BitShares reserve pool over the past 6 months. He has found after accounting for all the fees collected and all of the witnesses and workers paid from the reserve pool, that reserve pool is currently operating at a daily loss of 326.5k BTS per day.

_"Meaning the reserve pool subsidizes the running of the DEX ..."_


More details are below with emphasis added


_"As you can see, the majority of the transactions are transfers,order creations and order cancellations. Keep in mind that only filled/partially filled orders are charged the creation fee. And only about half of the orders created are actually filled (and thus pay fees) before being cancelled._

_"Turns out that with the current fee schedule, the total fees over the last 6 months come to a total sum of just over 3m BTS._

_"This means that approx 600k BTS is returned to the reserve pool from fees or just over 100k BTS / month (3500 BTS / day)._

_"Around 25% of that comes from transfer ops, a staggering 40% or so from asset issuance performed by gateways and 20% from account creation._

_"**So >85% of the DEX reserve pool revenue comes from non-trading operations.**_

_"Furthermore, the DEX reserve pool (replenished at 3.5K BTS / day as stated above) is spending approx 330k BTS daily at the moment. ~30k for witness payments and 300k on worker proposals._

_"**So it's running at a loss of about 326.5k BTS PER DAY at the moment.**_

_"Even if we consider worker proposal payments as an investment for the future rather than a running cost, although workers incldue the infrastructure worker payments, and only consider witness payments as running costs, the loss is still 26.5k BTS /day._

_"**Meaning the reserve pool subsidizes the running of the DEX to the tune of 88% or so.**_

_"The initial decision to have very low trading fees was taken to entice and bring in more users to the DEX. But as things stand the current base fee of 1/8th of a cent (0.0012 USD to be exact) for order creation of ANY size is way too low._

_"**The end result is that trading fees (order creation/update/cancel) account for just 4% of the DEX revenue despite accounting for >50% of the total usage.**_

_"I know this might not be immediately obvious to people because a lot of assets are gateway assets with an associated percentage based market trading fee which is high compared to most CEXs (usually 0.1% compared to 0.05% or less in competing CEXs) but that's a gateway issue._

_"**It is my belief that the BitShares fee schedule should be updated to increase fees for most operations and ensure the long term viability of the platform.**_

_"I have a Fee Schedule proposal I am currently working on that would see most fees raised 4x. Combined with a proposed 10% decrease in witness pay to 0.9 BTS / block, the reserve pool would only subsidize the platform to around 25%. Thus, with a 25% increase in usage/userbase the platform would go back to breaking even (if considering witness pay as the running costs) which sounds a lot healthier."_