📈 Binance Listing Fees 📉Bittrex Delisting Tokens — Cryptos for the Rest of Us
📈 Binance Listing Fees
What the Story?
Binance have announced that from the 8th of October 2018 listing fees from new tokens will be donated to their charity. Binance is the largest crypto exchange.
What are Listing Fees?
For new tokens to be available for trading on an exchange, they must be listed by the exchange.
There are technical changes that must be made to the exchange in order to make the token tradable. To account for these costs, many exchanges charge projects a ‘listing fee’ in order to integrate into their exchange.
Why List?
For crypto projects, getting listed on an exchange can bring a significant uplift to the price of their token. When a token is listed on an exchange there are far more opportunities to buy and sell the token.
This is known as liquidity. The more liquidity there is, the lower the risk is for the token holder because the token is easier to sell.
As a result of this lowered risk, prices for listed tokens tend to be higher. This effect is known as a ‘liquidity premium’ and well observed in traditional financial assets like stocks and bonds.
The larger the exchange, the more liquidity there is. Therefore, the larger an exchange the token can list on, the bigger the price uplift they can expect. As a result, the largest exchanges like Binance receive very high listing fees.
Why do This?
Binance have been heavily criticised for their listing fees. They don’t have any set fees and say that it’s completely voluntary. In fact, their listing criteria are very opaque.
In practice, most people believe that the highest bids get the highest priority. Because there are so many tokens that want to list on Binance, getting priority is a very big deal.
It appears this move is aimed at this criticism of the listing fees in the process.
It’s worth noting that the charity which these donations go to is affiliated with Binance.
📉Bittrex Delisting Tokens
What’s the Story?
Bittrex are removing wallets for certain tokens from their platform. Bittrex is a cryptocurrency exchange.
The affected tokens are BitShares, Bitcoin Gold, and Bitcoin Private. Customers of Bittrex who hold these tokens in their wallets received an e-mail with the notice.
Why Should I Care?
If you hold any of these tokens, then when the wallets are deactivated you will lose these tokens.
It’s worth noting that Bitcoin Gold and Bitcoin Private are forks of Bitcoin. If you held Bitcoin on Bittrex during the forks, then you would have been credited with these tokens.
Why is this Happening?
In fact, Bittrex don’t actually support Bitcoin Private trading, they just created wallets for customers to receive the forked tokens.
As trading volumes fall it becomes uneconomical for exchanges to keep certain assets on their platforms. In the case of these three tokens, clearly there was not enough trading volume on Bittrex for it to be worth them keeping.
It’s likely we’ll continue to see delistings of tokens on exchanges as markets and trading volumes remain depressed. Keep an eye out for these delistings. If you hold smaller tokens on exchange wallets they may be at risk of loss.
