Bybit, one of the largest crypto derivatives exchanges, has launched the crypto spot trading offering.
Announcing the news on Thursday, Bybit said spot trading in bitcoin (BTC), ether (ETH), XRP, and EOS coins is now available to users against the Tether (USDT) stablecoin. More trading pairs will follow shortly, said the exchange.
Bybit says it won’t charge any maker fees, which are levied for providing liquidity to the market in the form of buy or sell limit orders. Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange, for instance, charges 0.1000% maker fees for trading a volume worth less than 50 bitcoin.
Bybit’s zero maker fees is a “life-long” feature and not a limited-time offer, the exchange’s founder and CEO Ben Zhou told The Block. Bybit’s taker fees are 0.1% of trading volume, he said. Taker fees are usually higher than maker fees as taker orders are matched immediately against an order already on the order book, which removes liquidity.
Serving more customers
Bybit was founded in 2018 and is currently the second-largest bitcoin futures exchange in terms of open interest and trading volumes, according to The Block’s Data Dashboard. When asked why launch spot trading now, Zhou said it will allow the exchange to serve more customers.
“Now that we are comfortably at the top of the derivatives-only lane, and managed to stay operational throughout the bull run as virtually all our peers experienced overload and downtime, we feel it is time that we brought the same level of reliability Bybit has embodied in derivatives to spot,” said Zhou.
When asked how Bybit will ensure the liquidity of the spot trading offering, Zhou said there is an incentive program in place for market makers, and that currently “all” market makers are already plugged into the exchange’s testing environment.
Like Bybit’s derivatives offering, spot trading won’t be available to residents of the U.S., mainland China, Singapore, Quebec (Canada), Iran, Syria, North Korea, and other restricted jurisdictions.
Bybit will also launch options trading “later this year,” Zhou told The Block.
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