Crypto Exchange Hopes to Become Trendsetter by Scrapping Trading Fees Entirely

A crypto exchange has announced it is launching “zero-fee trading” across the 131 countries where it currently operates.

Zebpay says it wants to “liberate crypto from the shackles of trading fees, and to reduce the friction for all those who are new to crypto.”

Many exchanges charge a small commission whenever their users make a trade. While the company says fees of 0.25 percent may seem insubstantial, it warned they “certainly add up and can eat into trading profits,” and even deter infrequent traders from participating more.

In a blog post announcing the changes, Zebpay said: “The ethos of the crypto space is all about empowering individuals through decentralization. In this scenario, we strongly felt that it wasn’t fair to tax the actions of these empowered individuals. That’s why we got rid of the trading fee entirely. No maker-fees. No taker-fees.”

A rebranded service

Zebpay has also unveiled a new brand identity to mark its shift to fee-free trading.

The company hopes to become a trendsetter and is optimistic that other platforms will follow in its footsteps, stressing that its approach “is not a marketing gimmick but a brand promise – a belief that this is where the market must go.”

Its founders say they have been involved in the Bitcoin and the blockchain community since the early days before starting Zebpay in 2014. Since then, more than three million users have come on board the platform, amassing more than $2 billion in fiat-to-crypto trade volumes.

Ajeet Khurana, the CEO of Zebpay, told Cointelegraph: “In crystallizing the zero-trading fee model, our challenge was that historically approximately 90% of our revenues came from trading fees: How would we come up with an economic model that worked?

“But what we have repeatedly seen is that players that align with the sentiment called crypto, tend to make it big in the business called crypto. That’s what we are banking upon: people will rally to a provider that allows them to freely move across crypto-fiat and crypto-crypto pairs.”

New features, new look

Zebpay says that its zero-fees policy is complemented by how users are not required to have a minimum balance in their wallets — and the number of trades they can make on a daily basis is unlimited.

The company adds that its exchange has been given a “refreshing new look,” with the objective of being clean, intuitive and simple.

Zebpay says it invests heavily in security for its users and that it has an incident-free past. It aims to make the process of buying, selling and storing crypto stress free by ensuring that 98 percent of the cryptocurrencies it handles are kept in cold storage on air-gapped machines that have been distributed in cities around the world.

On its website, the team also explain that its infrastructure has been built so there is no single point of failure. They add: “Coins stored with us cannot be breached or accessed from one geographic location or by a single person. Apart from the cold storage, all hot wallet transactions on Zebpay are signed using systems across different cloud platforms.”

Zebpay says that it is committed to “engage, participate and grow the global crypto and blockchain community” — and to this end, it has become a member of Switzerland’s Crypto Valley as well as the Bitcoin Association Switzerland.

New features are regularly being added to its apps for Android and iOS devices. At the start of the year, Zebpay unveiled plans to expand its footprint in Europe by enabling users to make deposits and withdrawals in euros, paving the way for fiat-to-crypto trading on the continent. The feature is now live in 131 countries for everyday users and corporate investors.