Binance.US Eliminates Spot Trading Fees on Bitcoin

Binance.US claims to offer some of the lowest trading fees in the industry. The exchange currently charges a 0.1% spot trading fee on less than $50,000 of trade volume. It charges users lower fees the more they trade, according to its website.

“We see this as an opportunity to revolutionize the way fees are approached in our industry, increase accessibility to crypto, and help our market and customers in a time of need,” said Binance.US Chief Executive

Brian Shroder

in a statement.

It is the latest example of how organizations—traditional brokerages and digital upstarts alike—are offering discounts or eliminating fees to attract individual investors. To compensate for lower transaction fees, some brokerages have raked uninvested client cash from brokerage accounts into banking products. Others have routed customer orders to electronic trading firms called market makers in a practice known as payment for order flow.

Binance.US, launched in September 2019, is one of the largest crypto exchanges by trading volume, according to data provider CoinGecko. In April, the company raised more than $200 million in a seed round that valued it at $4.5 billion. Venture-capital firms including RRE Ventures, Foundation Capital, Original Capital, VanEck and Circle Ventures contributed to the funding round.

The company is looking to raise more money from strategic investors with no specific target amount in mind, according to a source familiar with the matter.

The announcement comes as bitcoin and major cryptocurrencies have plunged into a bear market since last year. As the Federal Reserve continues to raise interest rates to tame inflation, investors have been dumping speculative assets such as cryptocurrencies. Waning investor interest and a drop in trading volume have caught some exchanges off guard.

Coinbase Global Inc.,

the largest crypto exchange in the U.S., said last week it was cutting 18% of its staff. Crypto.com, a Singapore-based exchange, also said it would cut 5% of its workforce.

As of late Tuesday, bitcoin and ether were down 56% and 70%, respectively, this year. The market value of the entire crypto sector has fallen from a peak of about $3 trillion to $902 billion, according to CoinMarketCap data.