GMGN vs Photon (2026): Fees, Speed, and Which Actually Wins

The Short Answer

GMGN and Photon publish the identical fee, so cost is not the deciding variable. What separates them is reach. Photon is a Solana-only browser terminal. GMGN, at https://gmgn.ai, runs across Solana, BSC, Ethereum, Base and Tron, layers on copy trading, smart-money tracking and a family of Telegram bots, and collected $25.04M in trailing 30-day fees against Photon's $0.55M when DefiLlama's adapters were read on 2026-08-11.

The catch, and it is a real one: neither is the cheapest terminal on the market. Axiom is, by its own published schedule.

Side-by-Side

	GMGN	Photon
Product type	Multichain web terminal + Telegram bots + mobile apps	Solana-only browser trading terminal
Chains	Solana, BSC, Ethereum, Base, Tron (Blast as a URL param)	Solana only
Documented trading fee	1% flat, buy and sell	1% flat, buy and sell
Fee discount for users	None documented	None documented
Referral program	Docs describe 10%-30% to the referrer; no referred-user discount documented	None documented
30d fees (DefiLlama, 2026-08-11)	$25.04M	$554.6K
Lifetime fees (DefiLlama, 2026-08-11)	$262.0M	$441.0M
Copy trading	Yes, up to 10 tasks (Solana only)	Not documented
Smart-money / insider tracking	Wallet leaderboards, insider and sniper labels, wallet radar	Not documented
Telegram bots	Per-chain trading, alert and group bots	Not documented
Mobile apps	iOS and Android	No native app listed
Public API	Open data API, gated trading API, agent API	Not documented
Native token	None documented	None documented
MEV protection	Anti-MEV modes, priority fee floor of 0.002 SOL	Priority fee, tip and an Auto Speed mode, per Photon's fee docs

The Number That Settles the Argument

Everyone in this category publishes roughly 1%, which has a useful side effect: fee revenue is close to a direct proxy for trading volume. Rank by fees and you are effectively ranking by how much money actually moves through each product.

Here is the tracked field over the trailing 30 days, from DefiLlama's "Trading App" and "Telegram Bot" categories as of 2026-08-06.

Source: DefiLlama Fees and Revenue, retrieved 2026-08-06. These figures moved sharply within the following week. On a re-read of the same endpoint on 2026-08-11, GMGN's trailing 30-day fees were $25.04M and Axiom's were $24.34M, so the top of this table changed hands inside five days. The terminal fee and market-share snapshot carries that re-read across four windows with the arithmetic printed.

Two readings matter. First, on the 2026-08-06 pull the top four names took roughly 95% of everything this group collected. The middle of the market has fallen out. Second, GMGN out-earned Photon by a wide margin on both pulls while Photon has collected more money over its lifetime ($441.0M against $262.0M on the 2026-08-11 read). Photon was the king of this category and is not any more.

The scale of Photon's decline is worth stating plainly, because the listicles ranking it first do not appear to have looked. On DefiLlama's series for Photon, the best month was January 2025 at $84.6M in fees and July 2026 came in at $551,656. Photon is still trading and still perfectly usable, but calling it a leading terminal in 2026 describes a product that no longer operates at that scale.

Fees: Identical, and Both More Expensive Than You Think

This is where most comparison articles get sloppy, so here are the primary sources.

GMGN documents a flat 1%. From its official fee page: "GMGN only charges a 1% handling fee for a single transcation, and there are no additional charges" (typo theirs). That page describes no separate sniper fee, no separate copy-trade fee and no per-chain variation. Source: docs.gmgn.ai fees and settings, read 2026-08-11. Our full breakdown of what that 1% does and does not cover is in GMGN fees explained.

Photon documents a flat 1%. From its official fee page: "Photon fees are collected in SOL and it is 1% of the initial token used for every buy and sell transaction." Source: Photon fee documentation, read 2026-08-06. I went through Photon's published docs looking for a tier table, a volume discount or a subscription plan on that date and did not find one, so treat the single flat rate as what Photon publishes rather than as a guarantee that nothing else exists. DefiLlama's adapter reads the same way from the other direction: on the 2026-08-06 pull it recorded Photon's revenue as equal to its fees, meaning the adapter attributes none of the take to anyone else.

On top of the platform fee, you pay network costs. On Solana that means a priority fee and a tip, which go to validators and block builders rather than to the terminal. GMGN's docs set a minimum of 0.0001 SOL each with a ceiling of 2 SOL each, and require a priority fee of at least 0.002 SOL to enable Anti-MEV. Photon's own fee documentation describes a Priority Fee and a separately configurable tip, plus an Auto Speed mode that sets both for you. These settings routinely cost more than the 1% on small trades, which is why they are worth tuning. If your trades are failing outright, GMGN transaction failed walks through the usual causes.

The referral claim you should ignore

A lot of pages state that signing up to GMGN through a referral code cuts your fee to 0.7% or 0.9%. I could not find that number anywhere in GMGN's published fee or referral documentation when I checked on 2026-08-11. What GMGN publishes is a rebate paid to the referrer, worth 10% to 30% of the fees their referrals generate. The person doing the trading pays the standard 1% either way.

There is a related figure worth reporting carefully. On DefiLlama's GMGN summary read 2026-08-06, the gap between the fees the adapter recorded and the revenue it attributed to GMGN was 19.6% over 30 days and 14.7% all-time. That gap is what the adapter does not attribute to the platform. What GMGN actually pays out and to whom is a private arrangement we cannot see, so we report the gap and stop there.

We use a referral link on this site and it earns us a share of GMGN's cut. It does not give you anything. Saying otherwise would be a false claim, so we don't. The mechanics are laid out in full in the GMGN referral code guide.

The Thing Nobody Else Reports: GMGN Is Majority BSC

Every comparison article on the open web, including GMGN's own blog, frames GMGN as a Solana tool and benchmarks it against Photon on Solana. DefiLlama's per-chain fee data stopped supporting that read in late 2025.

Here are GMGN's trailing 30-day fees by chain, from the totalDataChartBreakdown field of api.llama.fi/summary/fees/gmgn, read 2026-08-06.

Over the seven days to that same date the tilt was sharper: 78.7% BSC against 17.1% Solana. This mix keeps moving. A re-read of the same field on 2026-08-11 put Solana at 12.7% of GMGN's trailing 30-day fees, with the bulk sitting on a chain GMGN's documentation does not mention at all, which we cover in the market-share snapshot.

The pivot has a date on the same series. In January 2025, DefiLlama's chain breakdown for GMGN attributed 99.5% of its fees to Solana. BSC first crossed 40% in September 2025. Then October 2025 broke the series: $44.6M in fees in a single month, of which 93.6% came from BSC, during the BNB Chain memecoin mania. That one month is 18.6% of everything the adapter has recorded for GMGN. Every month since has been BSC-majority on that data, and GMGN's Solana fees have sat between $2.1M and $3.1M per month for a year while BSC did the growing. All of those figures come from the same endpoint, read 2026-08-06.

This matters for the Photon comparison in a specific way. Photon competes with GMGN only on Solana, and Solana is now the smaller half of GMGN's measured fee base. The two products barely overlap any more.

Two Market Shares, Both True

Share means nothing without a stated cohort, so here is the one used below. It is the ten terminals in the table further up, which are the ones DefiLlama tracked with a working fee adapter in its Trading App and Telegram Bot categories on 2026-08-06. Each share is that terminal's fees over the sum for the whole group on the same window, computed from api.llama.fi/summary/fees/{slug}, with per-chain figures from totalDataChartBreakdown. BullX and Nova are excluded because their adapters are broken, as described above.

On that cohort and that date, GMGN held 20.28% of trailing 30-day fees across all chains, second to Axiom. Restricting the same data to the Solana portion, GMGN held 7.49%, which is fourth, behind Axiom, fomo Wallet and Pump.fun's Terminal. Both statements come from the same pull on the same day and both are correct. Five days later the all-chain picture had moved enough to flip the top of the table, which is the whole argument for dating a share figure.

Off Solana, on that same cohort and date, GMGN is not competing so much as occupying:

Photon, on the Solana portion of the same cohort and date, held 1.30%. Axiom held 56.8%.

Source: Axiom, used under fair use for educational purposes

If you arrived here comparing three rather than two, the version that adds BullX and explains why every ranking page still lists it is GMGN vs Photon vs BullX.

Where Photon Genuinely Wins

Photon's decline does not make it a bad product, and I would rather be useful than tidy about this.

Source: Photon, used under fair use for educational purposes

Photon does one chain and does not ask you to think about any others. There is no chain selector, no per-chain bot handle, no wallet address that differs by network. If your entire universe is Solana memecoins, that focus is a real feature and GMGN's breadth is overhead you never use.

Its published fee model is also the simplest in the category. One rate, no tiers, no volume thresholds, no rebate program to understand. What you see is what you pay. The flip side is that Photon's docs describe no activity-based path to paying less, so unlike Axiom there is nothing to work toward.

Photon's remaining users, in the forum and X threads I read while writing this, mostly cite execution speed on manual entries, and its docs do expose the relevant controls directly: a priority fee, a tip, and an Auto Speed mode that manages both. I could not verify a benchmark for that speed claim, so treat it as what those users report rather than something measured. Photon also has the longer track record in raw dollars, with $441.0M collected against GMGN's $262.0M on DefiLlama's 2026-08-11 read.

Where GMGN Wins

GMGN's advantage is surface area, and it is not close.

Chains. Solana, BSC, Ethereum, Base and Tron, with dedicated Telegram bots per chain. Photon documents one.

Copy trading. Up to 10 concurrent copy tasks with fixed or proportional sizing, market-cap and liquidity filters, token-age filters, launchpad filters and a 20-token blacklist. Photon's docs describe no equivalent. It is Solana-only on GMGN, which is worth knowing before you plan around it, and we cover the setup and the failure modes in GMGN copy trading.

Smart-money and insider tooling. Wallet leaderboards ranked by profit and win rate, a wallet radar that scans up to 10 tokens at once for shared holders, insider and sniper labels on token pages, rug probability derived from holder behavior, and phishing checks on wallet pages. This is the part of GMGN that started as its whole product in 2023.

Automation. Limit buys and sells, take-profit and stop-loss presets, trailing take-profit and trailing stop-loss, migrated snipes, and a dev-sell trigger that exits when the token creator dumps. The trenches and sniping workflow is covered in GMGN trenches and sniper guide.

Distribution. Telegram bots, iOS and Android apps, an open data API, and an agent API with MCP skills. Photon is a website.

There is a genuine trade-off attached. GMGN's in-app wallets behave like custodial accounts: its docs state that private key export is prohibited on every chain, and connecting Phantom creates a GMGN-side custodial account rather than a self-custodial session. That is a meaningful difference from holding your own keys, and we treat it seriously in is GMGN safe, and who holds your keys.

The Uncomfortable Part: Axiom Is Cheaper Than Both

GMGN is our referral partner. Axiom still wins on published price, and pretending otherwise would make everything else here worthless.

Axiom publishes a base fee of 1.00% reduced by a volume-tiered SOL cashback: Wood 0.95%, Bronze 0.90%, Silver 0.875%, Gold 0.85%, Platinum 0.825%, Diamond 0.80%, Champion 0.75%. On top of that, its docs state that users signing up through a referral link receive a 10% discount on trading fees, which is a user-side discount of a kind GMGN does not publish. Source: Axiom fee documentation, read 2026-08-11. On DefiLlama's 2026-08-06 pull, the Axiom adapter attributed 61.4% of collected fees to the platform as revenue, against 80.4% for GMGN. That is what the adapter reports; how each platform actually distributes the remainder is not something the data shows.

Axiom was also the largest product in the category at $22.35M over 30 days on the 2026-08-06 pull, and held 56.8% of Solana cohort fees on that date. On Solana specifically, it is the default answer.

The Rest of the Field, Priced From the Docs

Almost every platform here publishes 1%, which is why fee share tracks volume share so closely. The exceptions are the interesting part. Every rate below is quoted from the linked document, read 2026-08-06.

Three corrections fall straight out of that table. Trojan's own FAQ says 1%, not the 0.9% repeated across dozens of comparison pages. Maestro's fee FAQ describes its $200 per month Premium tier in terms of features, and does not describe it as lowering the 1%, which several articles get backwards. And Moonshot's support page puts small trades at 2.5% under $100, which is 2.5 times GMGN's documented rate on a $50 buy.

Two terminals that are not what the lists still say they are

Comparison pages keep listing these as independent going concerns. The public record reads differently.

Padre and Terminal. DefiLlama's methodology note on the terminal protocol reads "previously known as Padre." The fee handoff in that data has no gap: Padre's last fee day is 2025-10-24 and the terminal protocol's first is 2025-10-25. Both trade.padre.gg and terminal.pump.fun served byte-identical markup when I checked on 2026-08-06, including the same trailing typo in the meta description. Terminal recorded $3.05M over 30 days on that pull. I am reporting what the data and the two pages show rather than the terms of any arrangement between the parties, which have not been published anywhere I could find.

Vector.fun. Its DefiLlama fee series drops to $0 from December 2025, and vector.fun redirected to a Privy wallet-recovery endpoint when I checked on 2026-08-06. Something happened to that product in late 2025. What exactly, and on what terms, is not something I can source, so I am not going to say.

Who Should Pick Which

Choose Photon if:

• You trade Solana exclusively and want the smallest possible interface.
• You prefer a browser terminal with no Telegram dependency.
• You value one flat rate with no tiers or programs to manage.

Choose GMGN if:

• You trade BSC, Base, Ethereum or Tron at all. Photon cannot follow you there.
• You want copy trading, wallet tracking or smart-money leaderboards.
• You want Telegram bot execution or a mobile app alongside the web terminal.
• You want automation such as trailing take-profit, migrated snipes or dev-sell exits.

Choose Axiom if:

• Price is your primary filter. Its published net fee is genuinely lower.
• You trade Solana and want the venue with the deepest current flow.

Choose Jupiter if:

• You are placing occasional manual swaps and do not need discovery tooling.

The Verdict

On the metric this category is usually ranked by and rarely measured on, GMGN beat Photon by a wide margin on both of our pulls: $25.04M against $554.6K in trailing 30-day fees on 2026-08-11, and $9.31M against $507,610 five days earlier. It also runs on five more chains and ships a much larger feature set for the same documented 1%. If you are choosing between only these two, GMGN is the stronger product in 2026 unless Solana-only simplicity is specifically what you want.

The more useful conclusion is that this stopped being a two-horse race. Axiom is cheaper than both by its own published schedule and was the largest fee collector in the group on the 2026-08-06 pull. GMGN's real moat is not Solana, where it sat fourth on that date, but BSC, where it took 95.7% of the cohort's fees. If that is where you trade, nothing else in the category is close.

If GMGN is where you land, how to trade on GMGN is the practical starting point and what is GMGN covers the full product. Set up the wallet first with connect Telegram and fund your GMGN wallet.

This is not financial advice, and nothing here is legal, regulatory or tax guidance. Fees, chain support and market share all move. Every figure here carries the date it was read, and this page is re-checked against the same endpoints on a monthly cadence.