Every trade you've ever made carried a hidden tax Every time you trade on a conventional exchange, you pay a spread. You know this. What you probably don't know is why it's so much wider than it needs to be. Traders who act on better information push prices toward fair value. That's not a flaw - that's price discovery working exactly as it should. However, in a FiFo market, the fastest participant prices their information before anyone else can react. No competition, hence no cheaper alternative. The cost becomes the maximum value they can extract based on the available liquidity - and the market has no choice but to pay it. First in, first to extract FiFo doesn't reward better information. It rewards faster infrastructure. The first to arrive captures the full value of a signal - even if ten others held the same view and would have offered it cheaper. The signal gets monetized once, by one participant, at full extraction. That's what makes informed flow toxic. Liquidity providers adapt - wider spreads, pulled quotes, reduced size. Every adjustment makes the market worse for everyone else. The spread you pay on every trade includes the accumulated cost of a market defending itself against its own design. A hidden tax, baked into every transaction. Speed is the wrong race On Pod, all orders within a defined window clear at a single uniform price. First or last - it doesn't matter. Speed is structurally irrelevant. This creates a free market, which prices information at its true marginal value. Informed traders compete on the quality of their signal, not their connection. If someone else holds the same view, they'll offer it cheaper. Spreads tighten. The arms race ends. The hidden tax disappears. What was taken silently is returned transparently Every signal has a marginal value. When the market prices that correctly, a natural remainder emerges - the surplus. The gap between what traders were willing to pay and what they actually traded at. In a FIFO market, surplus is non-existent due to the maximum extracted value. On @poddotnetwork it is returned back to every participant. The clearing price isn't set by one trader. It's the product of every order in that batch - from the largest to the smallest trade. Every participant shaped that price, so every one deserves a share of what it produced, proportional to their contribution.
