Tag: Fee

Bitstamp Charges Inactive Fee to Make Up for Costs

by Blockchain News

Inactive users of the cryptocurrency exchange Bitstamp platform will have to pay a fee to make up for costs, according to a report from The Block.

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Bitstamp is taking this action as the crypto market is weighing on trading value and the new inactivity fee will impact customers with balances below $200 for the last 12 months, according to the company’s blog post.

The inactivity fee is set at 10 euros and will go into effect on August 1. Traders must trade, deposit, or stake on Bitstamp’s platform to avoid the fee.

However, the company said that the fee is not applicable to US users, and active users would not be charged regardless of their balance.

“The majority of Bitstamp’s customers are not affected by the Inactivity Fee,” Bitstamp said. “Nobody loves fees (we don’t either!) but keeping inactive accounts on the books is a cost, and in order for us to continue providing great services to all our customers, we made the hard decision to implement the Inactivity Fee.”

According to The Block, most exchanges earn their revenue from charging fees on trading volumes. However, those fees have dropped abruptly alongside the price of cryptos since the beginning of the year. The Block shared data that showed that volumes across exchanges have declined from $2.2 trillion in May 2021 to approximately $622 billion in June.

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Bitcoin worth $2 billion moves for just 78 cents

by Cointelegraph

Block data from Blockchain.com reveals that a colossal Bitcoin (BTC) transaction worth $2 billion was processed on Monday night. Despite the enormous financial value, the unknown wallet holder only paid 0.00001713 BTC fees equivalent to 78 cents. 

Although it is unknown what the purpose of this transfer was, or indeed which individual or entity enacted it, what has clearly been showcased is the enormous potential of financial transactions utilizing cryptocurrency and blockchain technologies.

However, this is not the first instance of a transaction of this magnitude reported with minimal fees. Back in August 2020, a Bitcoin transaction worth $1 billion was recorded with a nominal fee of just $4.

Attempts to transfer money of this value in traditional fiat markets would simply be futile. Anchored to anachronistic models, the financial ecosystem stands as a stark outlier to the instantaneous, largely inclusive modern information services experience.

An international fiat transfer often takes one to four working days to process and includes a hefty transaction fee of 1-3%. For a transaction worth $2 billion, this would come at the cost of between $20 – $60 million.

Alongside this, banks and governments hold central influence over the activity of financial infrastructures, unlike Bitcoin, and as such arguably threaten the privacy, autonomy and principles of a free market.

According to BitInfoChart, the average price of a transaction fee on Bitcoin’s base-layer blockchain stands at 0.000058 BTC ($2.67). This has been a consistent floor level across the last two months but was not been printed before that since the beginning of the market’s bullish surge in October 2020.

For context purposes, the average transaction fee for the second-largest crypto by market cap, Ethereum, remains several multiples (770%) higher at 0.0061 ETH ($20.44).

Related: BTC price nears $46K with Bitcoin exchange reserves lower than November 2020

Technical data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro reveals that Bitcoin surmounted a challenge to re-establish $46,000 on Tuesday morning after registering price lows of $43,380 on Bitstamp in the wake of major market volatility.

This bullish sentiment falls in line with an additional data point that reserves of Bitcoin on major cryptocurrency exchanges have recorded new multi-year lows this week — akin to the transaction fees — levels not witnessed since the inception of the bullish surge in October 2020.