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Bitfinex Ether launch[/h][h=6]Posted: March 12, 2016[/h]Bitfinex is pleased to announce upcoming support for trading Ether. While we are generally wary of adding new digital assets to the platform and believe that Ether’s future as a store of value is quite uncertain, it is, nonetheless, hard to ignore the Ether trading volumes at other exchanges and the many requests we have received from our customers to add Ether trading pairs. As such, we will begin trading Ether against both US dollar and bitcoin on Monday, March 14[SUP]th[/SUP] at noon UTC. Starting immediately, however, customers will be able to deposit Ether into their exchange wallets.
It is our plan to allow shorting and margin trading on Ether as soon as we are comfortable with the book depth and availability of Ether for lending, but that will depend on the community’s support for Ether trading on our platform as Bitfinex itself is not a market participant in its own markets. Assuming strong adoption of Ether trading on our platform, we could enable shorting and margin trading in less than a week. We do not yet know what sort of leverage ratios we will permit on Ether, but given Ether’s substantial volatility relative to bitcoin, we may, in fact, initially allow less leverage than we do on bitcoin.
In order to encourage market making to help jumpstart our Ether markets, we will be offering introductory pricing on both Ether pairs. Through the end of March, it will be free to add liquidity (market maker) and 20bps to remove liquidity (market taker). Trading volumes in Ether during this time will not affect volume tiers for bitcoin and litecoin, but after March, Ether will be part of the existing aggregated volume pricing tiers.
We are also actively pursuing the addition of Euro trading pairs as well – we will naturally keep the community apprised of any further developments. Once again, we thank you for your continued support as we strive to deliver the best in cryptocurrency trading.
