Bitfinex, reviewed on a schedule that charges nothing to trade
Maker zero, taker zero, spot and derivatives alike, per the published fee page. The cost did not vanish. It moved to the funding book and the bank wire, and on a small fiat round trip the arithmetic is unkind.
Zero multiplied by any volume is still zero, which makes the execution section of Bitfinex’s published fee schedule the shortest of its kind this desk has read. Spot and margin: maker zero, taker zero. Derivatives: the same two zeros. The OTC desk: zero. As of this writing there is no maker-taker ladder on the page, because there is nothing to climb.
A venue still has to be paid. The rest of the schedule is where.
The file
Zero is not a discount. It is a different business
Most venues price execution and let the ladder do the sorting: the small account subsidises the large one, and the largest are paid to show up. Per Kraken’s published schedule, its entry spot tier runs 0.40% maker and 0.80% taker, falling to 0.02% and 0.12% at five million dollars of 30-day volume and to a zero maker fee at ten million. The rebate proper is a futures line: -0.003% to the maker above two hundred and fifty million, -0.006% above a billion. Bitfinex’s page collapses that apparatus into one row.
For a retail taker that is the strongest number in the category. The taker side is where a small account bleeds, and the gap between 0.80% and nothing is most of that bleeding.
For a professional maker it reads the other way. Zero is a floor, not a rebate. Quote size at a laddered venue and the ladder eventually pays you; here nothing does, because there is no tier below zero. The missing rebate line is the clearest thing the page says about who it was written for.
The money is in the funding book
Follow the charges and they land on lending. Borrowers pay nothing to borrow. Lenders hand over 15% of the fees their active loans and funding contracts generate, 18% on hidden offers. That taxes the supply side of leverage rather than the people using it — coherent, unusually explicit, and a bet that the funding market stays liquid.
Two smaller lines are worth reading before they apply. Return a loan manually and the schedule charges a minimum hour of interest, one-second increments after that. And where Bitfinex takes a position over instead of liquidating it, the schedule charges 5% of the loss immediate liquidation would have inflicted — a number that matters only on the worst day of the year, which is why it belongs beside the zeros.
The LEO discount is modest and familiar: 0.05% off P2P lending fees per 10,000 USDt held, capped at 5%. The saving is basis points; the holding is a token that moves. Not the same unit. For the opposite design, see our assessment of Hyperliquid’s fee ladder.
The wire is the fee schedule
Here is where the zero gets expensive. Crypto and stablecoin deposits are free, as are internal transfers between users. Bank wires are not. A deposit by plain wire carries 0.1% with a minimum of 60 dollars or euro; a withdrawal carries 0.1% with a minimum of 100. Run a thousand-dollar round trip through those two lines and the minimums, not the percentage, decide the bill: 160 dollars on a thousand, before a single trade. The stated rate does not bind until roughly sixty thousand in and a hundred thousand out.
Express withdrawal, quoted at 1.000% with a minimum of 125, prices a wire the page puts inside 24 hours on business days at a level most banks would blush at. The OpenPayd rails soften this for smaller European users: a flat 5 euro or pounds below the 10,000 threshold, 0.1% above it. The schedule also carries a 150-dollar token recovery charge.
The shape is consistent. Execution, which other venues price in basis points, costs nothing; the rails, which most schedules treat as an afterthought, carry the floor charges. None of that is a recommendation to fund anything — these are high-risk markets whatever the trading costs, and the reading is yours before the money moves.
What the page will not tell you
Everything above is priced. Nothing above is structural. The schedule does not say which entity holds a balance, how withdrawals behave under stress, or where a customer claim ranks if things stop. This desk claims no authorisation for the venue anywhere, and the fee page claims none either. A price list has never described a counterparty.
The two columns
Verdict
Zero is a real number, printed where anyone can check it, which is more than several louder venues manage. The marks come off for what surrounds it: no rebate for the people who make the book work, minimums that fall hardest on the smallest accounts, and a document that stops where the interesting questions start.