Binance.US in an effort to encourage more activity during this tough bear market, has begun to provide zero-fee trading for Bitcoin to its American customers. Binance.US’s CEO Brian Shroder said that “Since inception, we have been known for our really low fees.” Furthermore, he added zero-fee trading would result in “positive user sentiment,” which would attract more users. Currently, the promotion is only available to BTC users in the United States. The majority of centralized exchanges’ income comes from trading and transaction fees.
The move is probably going to make exchanges more competitive, especially in the US, where Binance has a lot of formidable competitors like Coinbase, FTX, and Gemini. Analysts have already predicted that in order to compete, Coinbase would have to lower its already-industry-leading costs. For high rollers who transact in significant amounts, Coinbase offers lower costs, while the average retail dealer is smacked with the highest tier.
Binance.US CEO Shroder further affirmed that, “we take no spread because we are not involved in the transaction.”
With zero-fee trading on Binance.US, there is also no spread. A spread is a small price discrepancy between an asset’s actual market value and the price at which the exchange lists it.
Additionally, the company hopes to increase revenue through its recently established staking business, from which it receives a percentage of the yields. In an effort to compete with Coinbase, Binance.US introduced cryptocurrency staking services to its users earlier this month. Users would earn varying yields from staking seven crypto assets, including Binance Coin (BNB), Solana (SOL), Avalanche (AVAX), Cosmos (ATOM), The Graph (GRT), Livepeer (LPT), and Audius (AUDIO).
Despite the dramatic decline in cryptocurrency markets over the previous several months, Binance trade volume has stayed largely steady. As of June 22, CoinGecko estimates that the daily spot volume of the international exchange is $13 billion. The trade volume has fluctuated between a high of over $50 billion per day and a low of about $6 billion per day, although the long-term trend is range-bound. With $2.2 billion daily volume, FTX is the second-largest cryptocurrency exchange, and Coinbase is third with $1.8 billion. For both of these controlled crypto exchanges, the range-bound patterns are comparable.
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