Kraken Adopts Maker-Taker Fee Model

Cryptocurrency exchange Kraken has reduced its trading fees and moved over to a maker-taker model.

The exchange currently dominates the market for euro-based Bitcoin trading, and typically ranks in or near the top ten globally in overall trading volume.

Kraken says the move to the model, already used by many crypto exchanges, was made due to popular demand.

Market makers add Liquidity to the market by supplying orders not immediately executable, whereas takers remove liquidity by submitting orders that are.

The approach taken by most exchanges using this model has been to reward makers with no fees or even rebating them with a portion of the fees charged to takers. Kraken, however, will be charging fees to market makers unless their rolling 30-day trade volume is greater than $10 million.

Market makers will now pay between 0% and 0.16% per trade, depending on rolling volume, and takers will pay between 0.1% and 0.26%. The fees are lower than average for the industry.

The new model will not apply to the recently introduced dark pool trading, which is designed to hide open orders from other market participants. Also, its is not applied to all trading pairs.

Kraken has been fairly active adding new features such as margin trading in an effort to compete in an increasingly saturated market.