Is the Fee-Free Era Over for Market Makers?

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This piece was written and researched by Omar El Safy and edited by Pet Berisha.

Prediction market venues spent most of 2026 paying market makers for liquidity. Now some of them have started charging market makers instead.

September 2026 was the biggest month on record, with the 11 US venues we track trading $76.7B of notional volume, 26x YoY.

A market maker is a trading firm that's always ready to buy or sell (within reason). So whenever you want to place a bet, there's someone on the other side of it. Prediction markets need them; otherwise, traders have no one to bet against.

This month, two of the biggest US venues changed what they charge market makers.

Whoever takes a market maker's price is called the taker. The exchange makes its money from fees, so it decides who pays them, the maker or the taker.

Offering prices on a quiet market with few traders is riskier, so venues pay market makers to do it, through rebates or by waiving their fees, mostly in new markets and new products. For most of 2026, takers paid the fees and market makers got rebates or paid nothing.

DKeX did exactly that on NFL games and combos, and their filing to the CFTC explains why the NFL waiver is ending.

DKeX say their "review of quoting in the covered markets indicates that liquidity in those markets is well established before the start of the event." The same filing says incentives under their market maker programme "should not exceed what is reasonably necessary" to keep liquidity on DKeX's order books.

In the two weeks after the combo fee started, DKeX's combos averaged $67.4M of notional volume per day, up from $53.0M in the two weeks before, and stayed at about 64% of DKeX's volume.

However, those were also the first few weeks of the NFL season, so some of that growth was inevitable anyway.

Polymarket US went from $87.9M of notional volume in December 2025 to $8.75B in September 2026, when they overtook Polymarket International for the first time.

And on Monday, they cut their market maker rebates. Until then, every market maker got a small rebate each time someone traded against their prices in a single market (one game or one outcome, rather than a combo).

On a $50 trade (100 contracts at 50¢), that came to about 31¢.

Now only firms that traded more than $10M the previous month get a rebate at all, and even the biggest firms get less than before. The rebate works the same way in every single market agnostic of category or sport.

Polymarket US's fee schedule says "Combo fills carry no maker rebate," though combo trades still count towards a firm's monthly volume.

Polymarket US launched combos as a test for a few large traders in August 2026, and in the week of 12 October 2026 they traded $1.97B in notional volume, about 58% of total volume that week.

Takers pay more on combos too, on a separate, steeper fee schedule. On a 5¢ combo, the fee is ~11.5% of the stake, compared with 6.6% on a single market at the same price. At 50¢, the gap is smaller, 3.85% compared to 3.5%.

Table tennis is one of the thinnest markets Polymarket US has. A typical match, mostly in the Setka Cup leagues in Ukraine, the Czech Republic and Moldova, traded about 48,000 contracts in August and September 2026, compared with 412,000 for an ATP tennis match.

ATP tennis has far more fans, of course. But Polymarket US kept listing table tennis, and within three weeks of its launch in July 2026, table tennis accounted for about 13% of the exchange's volume.

Then on 7 October 2026, they raised the taker fee on table tennis to $2.50 on a $50 trade at 50¢, compared to $1.74 in every other market.

Polymarket US haven't said why. Our read is that table tennis costs market makers more to quote, with hundreds of small matches a day in leagues with little public information, so they've made takers cover that cost. Takers now pay 44% more.

Table tennis volume was already falling from late September 2026, before the fee rise, and it has kept falling since.

This shows that having a balance does matter when it comes to market maker fees in thin markets that users may well want to trade.

The fee-free era is ending first on the markets that already have deep liquidity, like NFL games and combos.

Kalshi have traded since 2021 and now charges market makers on their deepest markets, the NFL, ATP tennis and combos.

Polymarket US cut their rebate five months after dropping their waitlist in May 2026, and a month after overtaking Polymarket International.

DKeX launched in June 2026 and started charging combo market makers three months later.

Kalshi's combos are barely a year old and already carry a maker fee, after growing from 1.8% of Kalshi's notional volume in October 2025 to 58% in September 2026.

So how soon a venue starts charging depends on how quickly its markets fill up, whether through years of trading, a parent company's customers or a product that takes off.

Eight of the 11 US venues we track launched in the past 13 months, and more are waiting on CFTC licences. The new ones will likely do the same, paying market makers to build liquidity and charging them once it's there. And with more venues competing for the same market makers, fees could come down, and rebates go up.

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