Fees and costs
Everything you actually pay for an Atomicals action, including the costs people forget until they have already spent them.
Protocol behavior Verified 2026-08-31
Describes the Atomicals protocol itself at the pinned reference revision. It does not promise that any product exposes it.
- Page ID
-
guides/fees-and-costs - Normative authority
- Atomicals reference implementation
- Networks
- mainnet
- Documentation version
- 2026.08
- Audience
- everyone, creator
- Owner
- bitcoin-universe-docs
- Sources
-
- Atomicals JavaScript CLI
at
1333565efbfe - Universe ARC-20 index and Marketplace v1 authority
at
670030e50071private repository
- Atomicals JavaScript CLI
at
- Known limitations
-
- Marketplace fee amounts are deployment configuration, not protocol behavior. Read the fee disclosure in the flow you are using.
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Before you start
Section titled “Before you start”- Supported networks: mainnet.
- Status: protocol behavior for the transaction costs, Universe implementation for marketplace fees.
What you pay, by action
Section titled “What you pay, by action”| Action | Costs |
|---|---|
| Ordinary transfer | One Bitcoin fee |
| Mint or deploy | Commit fee, reveal fee, and grinding time if Bitwork applies |
| DMT claim | Commit fee, reveal fee, grinding, and the mint amount locked in output zero |
| Splat | One Bitcoin fee plus a dust-safe value per separated output |
| Marketplace listing | Usually no Bitcoin transaction until settlement |
| Marketplace purchase | The price, the settlement transaction fee, and any disclosed marketplace fee |
The costs people forget
Section titled “The costs people forget”The reveal fee scales with your payload. Embedding a large file makes the reveal transaction large. Estimate the reveal size with the real bytes before grinding.
Grinding invalidates your fee estimate. A successful grind changed the transaction, so recompute the fee afterwards.
A failed mint still costs a fee. A claim that misses the quota, the height, or the Bitwork still produced a confirmed Bitcoin transaction. See decentralised mint claims.
Locked value is not a fee, but it is money. A DMT claim locks mint_amount satoshis in output
zero. That is the token, not a cost, but it leaves your spendable balance.
Dust-safe outputs. Every coloured output must be above the relay dust threshold for its script type. Separating five Atomicals means five such outputs.
Reducing cost
Section titled “Reducing cost”- Reference shared bytes instead of embedding them again. See references and recursion.
- Store a compact source format rather than a large raster.
- Choose a Bitwork prefix you can actually afford to grind. Use the Bitwork estimator.
- Act at a lower fee rate when the action is not time sensitive.
- Avoid transactions that need to be rebuilt because a change output was the wrong size.
Marketplace fees
Section titled “Marketplace fees”Buyer and seller fees are deployment configuration. The flow you are using must disclose them before you commit. If a flow does not show the fee breakdown before the final confirmation, stop.