Bitfinex tripled the minimum fee for fiat withdrawals

Bitfinex, the fifth crypto platform in the CoinMarketCap ranking, without announcing changes, increased the minimum fee for withdrawing fiat funds from $20 to $60.

This is not the first change that Bitfinex has made to its payments traffic recently.

Two weeks ago, Bitfinex added a 3% fee for fiat withdrawal transactions that exceed a total of $1 million per month. 

Users who make more than one withdrawal within 30 days will also be charged this fee. The exchange also introduced this fee without warning, publishing new rules for users who frequently and in large volumes withdraw fiat from the platform after the fact.

The increase in the minimum fee appears to be related to the recent difficulties that Bitfinex has had with processing both US dollars and euros. Over the past couple of months, Bitfinex has repeatedly delayed the withdrawal of customer funds by a month, and in some cases canceled them and returned them to user accounts.

Most likely, the new rules are designed to discourage multiple transactions with a small denomination and encourage withdrawal of a large amount once a month. 

 By attempting to limit the number of monthly transactions, the exchange aims to reduce the burden on the bank.

However, the increase in minimum deposit fees will likely be unaffordable for a retail client who does not have six figures to trade or consolidate all withdrawals into a single transaction. As a result, all the changes boil down to the fact that in order to receive a minimum commission of 0.1%, you must immediately withdraw an amount of at least $60,000. And for a minimum transaction amount of $10,000, you will have to pay a maximum commission of 0.6%.

This is a fairly high threshold that can cut off most average retail clients.

After the innovations, Bitfinex has become one of the most expensive crypto platforms. Competing crypto exchanges offer more favorable conditions to their users. So in Bitstamp the minimum commission is $15, in Coinbase Pro - $25.