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

Search "GMGN vs Photon" and you get a page of confident rankings with no numbers behind any of them. I read about 22 of the pages that rank for this and its neighboring queries on 2026-08-06, and not one of them cited a dataset. BitDegree scores Photon 9.8 out of 10 and puts it first overall. Cryptonews evaluated "32 meme coin trading bots" and crowned Maestro. Ordoh picked Banana Gun. GMGN's own blog ranks first for "gmgn vs axiom" and never mentions either platform's revenue. Every one of those orderings is vibes plus affiliate payout.

So here is the difference with this page: every number below comes from DefiLlama's fee and revenue API, pulled on 2026-08-06, and every fee percentage is quoted from the platform's own published documentation with the URL attached. Where a figure is disputed or unverifiable, I say so instead of rounding it into a claim.

The Short Answer

GMGN and Photon charge 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 currently collects about 18 times Photon's fee revenue.

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

The Number That Settles the Argument

Everyone in this category charges 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.

Two readings matter. First, the top four names take roughly 95% of everything the category collects. The middle of this market has fallen out. Second, GMGN out-earns Photon by about 18 to 1 right now while Photon has collected nearly twice as much money over its lifetime ($440.8M against $240.1M). 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 clearly have not looked. Photon's peak month was January 2025 at $84.6M in fees. July 2026 was $551,656. That is about 99% below its own high-water mark. Photon is still trading and still perfectly usable, but calling it a leading terminal in 2026 describes a product that no longer exists 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 charges 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). There is no separate sniper fee, no separate copy-trade fee, and no per-chain variation. Source: docs.gmgn.ai fees and settings. Our full breakdown of what that 1% does and does not cover is in GMGN fees explained.

Photon charges 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. I searched Photon's full published docs for a tier table, a volume discount or a "Photon Prime" plan. None exists. DefiLlama confirms it from the other direction: Photon's revenue equals its fees exactly, a 100% retention rate, which is what you see when a platform pays out nothing.

On top of the platform fee both charge, you pay network costs. On Solana that means a priority fee and a Jito-style 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 combined ceiling of 2 SOL, and require a priority fee of at least 0.002 SOL to enable Anti-MEV. Photon exposes a Priority Fee and a "Bribe" separately, 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%. That number appears nowhere in GMGN's documentation. 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. DefiLlama's measurement of GMGN's actual referral outflows lands at 19.6% of fees over 30 days and 14.7% all-time, so even the referrer side sits well below the 30% ceiling most affiliate pages quote.

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. The fee data says that stopped being true in late 2025.

Here are GMGN's trailing 30-day fees by chain, from DefiLlama's breakdown on 2026-08-06.

Over the last seven days the tilt is sharper still: 78.7% BSC against 17.1% Solana.

The pivot has a date. In January 2025 GMGN was 99.5% 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 GMGN has ever earned. Every month since has been BSC-majority, and GMGN's Solana fees have been flat at $2.1M to $3.1M per month for a year while BSC did all the growing.

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 business. The two products barely overlap any more.

Two Market Shares, Both True

Here is where the honest answer gets more interesting than the marketing one.

Measured across all chains, GMGN holds 20.28% of the tracked terminal and bot cohort, second only to Axiom. Measured on Solana alone, GMGN holds 7.49%, which is fourth, behind Axiom, fomo Wallet and Pump.fun's Terminal. Both statements come from the same dataset on the same day and both are correct.

Off Solana, GMGN is not competing so much as occupying:

Photon, for reference, holds 1.30% of the Solana cohort. Axiom holds 56.8%.

Where Photon Genuinely Wins

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

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 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 retains 100% of what it collects, so unlike Axiom there is no path to paying less through activity.

Photon's remaining users mostly cite execution speed on manual entries, and its docs do expose the relevant controls directly: a Priority Fee, a Jito bribe, and an Auto Speed mode that manages both. I could not verify a benchmark for that speed claim, so treat it as what Photon's users report rather than something measured. Photon also has the longer track record in raw dollars, with $440.8M collected against GMGN's $240.1M.

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 has 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 documents 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 are effectively custodial: 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 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 real user-side discount of the kind GMGN does not publish. Source: Axiom fee documentation. DefiLlama corroborates that Axiom actually pays this out: it retains 61.4% of the fees it collects, against GMGN's 80.4%.

Axiom is also the largest product in the category at $22.35M over 30 days, and it holds 56.8% of Solana cohort fees. On Solana specifically, it is the default answer.

There is one counterweight worth stating carefully. On 2026-02-26, on-chain investigator ZachXBT alleged that a senior Axiom business-development employee abused internal dashboard access to look up private customer wallet addresses and traded on that information. This is an allegation attributed to ZachXBT. As of 2026-08-06 I could not locate an Axiom response, a regulatory referral or any litigation arising from it. It is not proven, and it should not be treated as proven, but it is relevant if your reason for choosing a terminal is trust rather than price.

The Rest of the Field, Priced From the Docs

Almost everyone charges 1%, which is why fee share tracks volume share so closely. The exceptions are the interesting part.

Three corrections fall straight out of that table. Trojan charges 1%, not the 0.9% repeated across dozens of comparison pages, per its own FAQ. Maestro's $200 per month Premium buys features, not a lower rate, which several articles get backwards. And Moonshot is the most expensive option in the category for small trades at 2.5% under $100, which is 2.5 times GMGN on a $50 buy, a fact I have not seen reported anywhere.

Two acquisitions the field has not noticed

While comparison pages keep listing them as independent products, two of these terminals were bought.

Padre was acquired by Pump.fun, announced 2025-10-24, and rebranded as Terminal. The fee handoff in DefiLlama has no gap: Padre's last fee day is 2025-10-24 and the new terminal protocol's first is 2025-10-25, with DefiLlama's own methodology note reading "previously known as Padre." Both trade.padre.gg and terminal.pump.fun still serve byte-identical markup, including the same trailing typo in the meta description. Terminal now does $3.05M over 30 days, which makes Pump.fun the launchpad, the AMM and a top-four terminal at once.

Vector.fun was acquired by Coinbase, announced 2025-11-21. The apps were shut down with a withdrawal deadline of 2025-11-26, its DefiLlama fees went to exactly $0 from December 2025, and vector.fun now redirects to a Privy wallet-recovery endpoint. Neither acquisition appears in any comparison article I found.

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 whole category is usually ranked by, and the one nobody actually measures, GMGN beats Photon roughly 18 to 1 in current revenue while running on five more chains and shipping a much larger feature set for the same 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.

But the more useful conclusion is that this is not really a two-horse race any more. Axiom is bigger than both combined and cheaper than both by its own published schedule. GMGN's genuine moat is not Solana, where it sits fourth, but BSC, where it holds 95.7% of tracked cohort 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. Fees, chain support and market share all move. Every figure here carries the date it was verified, and this page is re-checked against the same endpoints on a monthly cadence.