Economic Model

IOTrader’s economic model is designed to reward activity, liquidity, and participation across all sides of the ecosystem. Instead of concentrating value at the protocol or operator level, IOTrader distributes economic incentives to the users who create markets, trade in markets, and provide liquidity to markets. This aligns incentives between the protocol and its participants — the more active the network becomes, the more value the community earns, not the protocol’s core team.

The core revenue engine is driven by trading flows. Every leveraged trade, every market entry, and every exit generates protocol fees. These fees are transparent, on-chain, and tied directly to platform usage. Rather than charging hidden spreads or opaque mark-ups like centralized exchanges, IOTrader earns predictable, clean revenue from four sources: trading fees, settlement fees, market creation fees, and liquidation fees. This makes the protocol economically sustainable while remaining competitive.

A percentage of protocol revenue is allocated to token stakers. Users who stake the IOTrader token share directly in the economic upside of the network. This transforms the token from a passive asset into an income-bearing asset — driven by actual trading volume, not artificial emissions or inflation. The value of the token increases organically as platform activity increases, creating a direct link between network growth and token demand.

Market creators have their own incentive model within IOTrader. When a market is created and volume flows into it, the creator earns a lifetime share of the fees generated by that market. This incentivizes users to launch meaningful, high-impact outcome markets and to source attention, participants, and liquidity. Instead of relying on the team to decide what markets should exist, the community is economically motivated to build the long tail of the most relevant and profitable opportunity spaces.

Finally, IOTrader’s economic model supports liquidity providers by enabling them to earn yield from market participation. LPs earn on every trade routed through their liquidity. Combined with the staker rewards and market creator revenue share, IOTrader forms a multi-layered, circular incentive system where capital flows generate yield for the ecosystem participants — not for middlemen. This creates a financially self-reinforcing model where the protocol becomes more valuable the more open, deep, and active the marketplace becomes.