The 3% tax
3% on every buy, 3% on every sell — what it funds and how it is applied.
Every trade in $SWA is taxed. The rate is flat, symmetric, and applied at the contract level, which means it applies no matter which interface, router, or aggregator executes the trade.
What counts as a taxable trade
The tax targets market activity, not custody. In practice:
| Action | Taxed | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Buying $SWA on the open market | Yes — 3% | Applied on the way in, on the amount received. |
| Selling $SWA on the open market | Yes — 3% | Applied on the way out, on the amount sold. |
| Moving $SWA between your own wallets | No | A transfer is not a trade. |
| Receiving an airdropped position | No | Distributions are not taxed by the protocol. |
| Redeeming a position for supply | No trade tax | Redemption has its own protocol cut — see Redeem vs hold. |
The round-trip cost
Buying and then selling costs 3% on entry and 3% on exit, before AMM swap fees and before any price movement. A full round trip therefore starts at roughly 6% down.
This is deliberate. The tax is not primarily a revenue mechanism — it is a holding incentive. A 6% round-trip cost makes short-horizon rotation structurally unprofitable, which pushes the holder base towards the behaviour the airdrop engine rewards. If you intend to trade $SWA on a daily timeframe, the maths does not work and you should not participate.
Worked example
| Step | Gross | Tax | Net |
|---|---|---|---|
| Buy $1,000 of $SWA | $1,000.00 | $30.00 | $970.00 of $SWA received |
| Sell that $SWA immediately | $970.00 | $29.10 | $940.90 returned |
| Round trip | — | $59.10 | −5.91% before swap fees and slippage |
Where the tax goes
Collected tax accrues to the protocol treasury and is deployed across three destinations. All three are funded from the same pot; the proportional split between them is not yet finalised and is therefore not published as numbers anywhere on this site.
Buying the dividend-paying equities that enter the pool and back every position.
Funding the recurring distribution of fractional positions to eligible holders.
Custody, execution, reporting infrastructure, and ongoing development.
The reasoning for withholding the split rather than shipping a provisional one: a published allocation is a commitment about where holder money goes. Publishing a figure and then changing it is worse than publishing nothing, so the interface shows a pending state until the numbers are set. The Fees page holds a built allocation panel that will begin rendering the moment real values land.
How the tax compounds into the pool
Tax revenue is a function of volume, not of price. That has a few consequences worth internalising:
- Volatility funds the pool. Periods of heavy two-way trading generate more acquisition budget than periods of quiet appreciation.
- Sells fund the pool too. Unlike a buy-side-only fee, a symmetric tax means the treasury keeps accumulating during drawdowns, when equities are often cheaper to acquire.
- The pool ratchets. Stocks acquired with tax revenue are not sold to fund distributions; distributions are fractional slices of positions that remain in the pool. Pool size trends up over time in the absence of a rebalancing decision. See The pool.
Verifying the rate
Do not take this page's word for the rate. The tax is enforced in the token contract and can be read directly from it, and every individual fee event is listed in the Explorer with the trade size it was taken from. Divide one by the other and you get 3%.