Anyone concerned that Gemini seems to have raised their trading fees 4x in the past day on top of about a 2x increase from last year. Seems to add up to about 10x increase in their fees. Here is a thread that was started about the issue.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3248495.msg33826905#msg33826905I am kind of wondering what Gemini's goal is? It would seem that if they wanted to create more liquidity, then they would keep the fees lower, but perhaps they are attempting to become the Cadillac of exchanges, and I wonder if other exchanges will follow to raise their trading fees? or if Gemini will attempt to serve more of a niche clientelle who are willing to pay higher trading fees?
I would pay higher fees than on other exchanges if there is higher return. Whatever that might be... .
High return could be considered to be more security and more volatility, but I don't think that purposefully creating higher volatility by removing liquidity is a way to increase user confidence in a platform.
I have no real idea of their motivation at this point, except that they are attempting to go down the path of prestigious pricing, and that does not seem to be a good move based on their current market position based on current trade volume (but hey what do I know? Administrators/owners there would know their trade numbers better than my looking at what I believe to be their relatively mediocre trade volume).
Maybe it is just because of the low volume... . In that case, they might be followed by the others.
I am not sure about whether you are misreading my post. Gemini has lower trade volume relative to other exchanges; however, their increasing their fees is likely to decrease their trade volume - however, those kinds of measurements would be for them to make about whether their trading volume decreases significantly in order to cause the increase in fees to be imprudent, from a business perspective.
They are an exchange, so I am not sure about why they would take measures that might decrease their trading volume, unless they are gambling on the fact that more and more BIGGER investors are coming into the space (such as institutional investors), and they are trying to cater their platform towards the institutional investors rather than the regular Joe.. but even institutional investors like to see high volume which is likely going to come, in part, from regular Joes.
Regarding overall assessments of low trading volume, currently, I think that those kinds of assertions of low overall trade volume are a mythical, and I believe that we have not left BTC price battling, and this supposed consolidation game (in the below $10k arena) is not over yet... so even if there might be some recent drops in trade volume, I doubt that those recent drops are anything more than temporary - in the current bitcoin (and crypto) price dynamic climate.
There is a bit of a contradiction in the service that Gemini offers, because they are increasing their trading fees, but their fees for getting in and out seem to be lower than the average
(see these Gemini transfer fees)Sometimes I misread, indeed. But isn 't the low (appears zero)transfer fees, confirming the lack of voume motive for increasing trade fees?
I doubt that it would be reasonable to conclude that low trade volume is triggering certain business decisions from Gemini that are likely to play out over several months rather than how trade volume might trend over a longer period of time (such as over a year or two) while being low one week and high the next week.
Also, trade volume at any particular exchange as compared with other exchanges is one thing to assess and assessing overall trade volume is a compilation of the trade volume on all of the exchanges (close to 200 exchanges, now).
Regarding specific motivations for Gemini's business decision to change its fees, business may attempt a variety of ways to distinguish themselves from others. ... So there could higher fees for one service and lower fees for another service, and Gemini offers some services that are not offered by other exchanges too, including the daily OTC auctions that are intended for BIGGER investors.
Anyhow, there could be an incentive to make transferring fees cheap and trading fees high, but they might end up off-setting each other, yet there is going to remain a variety of factors concerning how exchanges might attempt to distinguish themselves from other exchanges and attempt to remain profitable to the kind of customer(s) that they might be attempting to attract.
It is also possible (but I doubt it) that Gemini tries out this particular new higher fee structure for a while, and they determine that they are losing too many average Joes in the process and losing some liquidity based on such losses of average Joes; however, if their higher fee structure attracts BIGGER institutions, then such newer BIGGER institutional volume could off-set their losses with average Joes, then they may decide that it is good to stay with the higher fees.
Some of that information about how one change affects some other part of their business is just outside of our reach or our time/willingness to attempt to analyze, yet I still think that you are too much buying into a narrative about bitcoin's trade volume supposedly being down in some kind of meaningful way that would affect Gemini's current decision about fees, which I don't think is the case - because I believe that it would be erroneous to use a hype period from August 2017 to February 2018 (from $2,600 to $19,666) as the standard of measurement, as if that is regular amount of trade volume for comparison purposes.... So sure, there does seems to be a whole hell-of-a-lot less hype in current times in regard to bitcoin trade and bitcoin overall, especially compared with August 2017 to February 2018, but so what.. the August 2017 to February 2018 was surely a hype-period, rather than this period being a currently low period... In other words, I conclude that trade volume is not currently low, merely because it happens to have come down from our recent previous hype-period.