Kobozu Research — a free sample of a weekly index we are preparing to launch.
Every Solana trading bot makes the same silent assumption: that swapping is cheap. It is — for some tokens. For others, a single round trip (buy, then sell back into USDC) quietly deletes more than 2% of your position before your strategy has done anything at all.
There is no standard public table for this. Price charts are everywhere; liquidity numbers are everywhere. What you pay to get in and back out is not. So we measure it ourselves: every hour, for 11 liquid Solana tokens at three sizes ($100, $500, $1,000), we record the full round-trip cost implied by Jupiter quotes — slippage, price impact, and fees included — and we publish the time series.
This sample issue is the complete table from our current measurement window: 36 hourly snapshots, 2026-11-12 12:00 UTC to 2026-11-13 22:00 UTC, 1,180 completed round-trip measurements (8 of 1,188 attempted legs failed and are excluded, not interpolated).
How to read these numbers
Costs are percentages of the position size. The arithmetic is simply cost × size: a cost of 2.21% on a $1,000 position means the round trip itself costs about $22.10, before any strategy edge is applied.
One honest disclosure, because it defines what this index is: these figures are quote-based. They are computed from Jupiter quotes captured hourly, not from executed trades — with one exception, SOL, discussed below. A quote is not a fill. Treat these numbers as a lower bound on what a market-order round trip would cost, and as a comparative index across tokens, not as a promise of execution.
The table: median round-trip cost (%)
| Token | $100 | $500 | $1,000 |
|---|---|---|---|
| IO | 0.77 | 1.31 | 2.21 |
| W | 0.65 | 0.89 | 1.26 |
| JTO | 0.60 | 0.69 | 0.80 |
| RENDER | 0.49 | 0.57 | 0.64 |
| PYTH | 0.24 | 0.54 | 0.61 |
| WIF | 0.19 | 0.49 | 0.58 |
| ORCA | 0.25 | 0.36 | 0.41 |
| BONK | 0.05 | 0.11 | 0.21 |
| RAY | 0.09 | 0.12 | 0.13 |
| JUP | 0.02 | 0.02 | 0.03 |
| SOL | −0.00 | −0.00 | −0.00 |
Read that again: at $1,000, IO costs about 100 times what JUP or SOL costs for the same round trip. Both are "major Solana tokens." A strategy backtested on SOL and deployed on IO is not the same strategy.
The tail matters: p90 round-trip cost (%)
Medians tell you the typical hour. Bots die in the bad hours. Here is the 90th percentile — the cost you should expect to pay or beat in roughly one hour out of ten.
| Token | $100 | $500 | $1,000 |
|---|---|---|---|
| IO | 0.78 | 1.63 | 2.54 |
| W | 0.68 | 1.02 | 1.44 |
| JTO | 0.62 | 0.71 | 0.82 |
| RENDER | 0.54 | 0.59 | 0.67 |
| PYTH | 0.29 | 0.59 | 0.69 |
| WIF | 0.20 | 0.54 | 0.59 |
| ORCA | 0.32 | 0.38 | 0.43 |
| BONK | 0.10 | 0.20 | 0.27 |
| RAY | 0.10 | 0.13 | 0.16 |
| JUP | 0.04 | 0.10 | 0.06 |
| SOL | 0.00 | 0.01 | 0.01 |
What changed inside the window
Splitting the 36 hours in half ($1,000 size, median of each half): most tokens barely moved. W got cheaper (1.63% → 0.98%), JTO got cheaper (0.98% → 0.60%), and RENDER got slightly cheaper (0.65% → 0.61%). IO got more expensive (2.10% → 2.24%). Nothing flipped its tier. The expensive tokens stayed expensive and the cheap tokens stayed cheap, across both halves of the window. That stability is the point: these are structural liquidity differences, not noise from a single bad hour.
The SOL note: quotes vs. real execution
SOL is the one token where we can check our quote-based numbers against reality, because we operate a live SOL track alongside the index.
- Quote-based SOL median across this window: −0.00% at $100, $500, and $1,000 — the deepest market on Solana, effectively free at quote level.
- Real execution: 9 completed round trips ($10 each) on the live track. Total realized cost across all nine: $0.078, independently recomputed by an auditor working in a separate session, with a final balance discrepancy of $0.00 between the operator's records and the auditor's recomputation.
Two honest conclusions. First, the quote-based method is not fantasy — for SOL it points the right way, and the real execution cost is also small. Second, one token is not eleven. This cross-check validates the method for SOL only. Extending it token by token is on the roadmap, and the index will never present a token as execution-validated until that check exists for that token.
What the weekly index will contain
- The full token × size table (median and p90), updated weekly from hourly measurement
- A change report: which tokens' cost regimes moved, and by how much
- Alerts when a token's measured cost crosses a pre-set threshold — a notification of the measured fact, not a trading recommendation
- Methodology notes, including the quote-vs-execution cross-checks as they expand beyond SOL
One final scope note: this is a measurement index, not investment advice, a trading signal, or a product announcement. It tells you what a round trip costs; it does not tell you whether to trade.
Accuracy, corrections, and use.
What we stand behind is reproducibility, not a guarantee that any figure matches any reader's trades. The data is provided as-is, without warranty of accuracy, completeness, or fitness for any purpose. Every measurement in the table was captured and verified; if any figure is later corrected, the correction is published as a separate note, not silently overwritten. Questions or corrections: kobozu.research@outlook.com. The data is provided as-is, without warranty of accuracy, completeness, or fitness for any purpose.
Kobozu Research — measuring what a round trip actually costs.
