CEX.IO Cuts Bitcoin Trading Fees Amid Mining Market Woes

CEX.IO is offering 0% trading fees for a short period of time as it renews its focus on the bitcoin exchange space, following the suspension of its GHash.io cloud mining contracts earlier this year.

The exchange, which currently charges a fixed 0.2% commission fee on all buy/sell transactions will cancel its trading fees for a one-week period, starting on 25th March.

Speaking to CoinDesk, Helga Danova, communications officer at CEX.IO, said:

"To make new features available for as many people as possible, we have opened up our service and invite people to try out trading on CEX.IO with 0% fees."

The free trading will cease on 1st April.

Heightened security

The move comes amid a series of company-wide improvements, including measures aimed at heightening security.

CEX.IO obtained a Level 3 PCI DSS certificate, according to Danova. The certificate is issued to help businesses process card payments securely and reduce fraud. To get the certificate, companies must introduce tight controls surrounding the storage, transmission and processing of cardholders' data.

CoinDesk contacted the PCI Security Standards Council for verification, but the organisation had not replied at the time of press.

Danova commented on the exchange's security priorities:

"As we are approaching 400,000 users, it is our priority to make the exchange more secure and easy-to-use, launching new features and opening the world of bitcoin to newcomers in the crypto field."

These attempts to enhance security come a couple of months after GHash.io was targeted, along with a number of bitcoin mining pools, by distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks.

At the time, CEX.io (which operated GHash.io) said the source of recent attacks on its pool came with increasing ransom demands.

Mining troubles

The exchange halted its cloud mining activities in January, with the company claiming that mining was no longer profitable and blaming declining revenue on bitcoin's decreasing price.

Prior to that, a number of miners opted to leave GHash.io's pool following a significant increase in its hash share. The mass-departure was based on the belief that a single entity controlling more than 50% of the network's computing power, could theoretically wreak havoc on the whole network.

Industrial bitcoin mining facility operator BitFury moved 1.5 petahash of its hashing power out of GHash's mining pool in June last year. At the time, Marc Aafjes, BitFury’s chief strategy and communications officer, suggested the company felt compelled to take action due to the widespread community concern, stating that "the high level of combined hash power in the Ghash pool is concerning to many participants in the system".

As a result of the controversy, GHash.io later agreed to limit its share of the total bitcoin network to 39.99% to avoid the associated threat of 51% attacks.

The decision was taken during the Bitcoin Mining Summit in July last year. The industry-wide event was organised by the controversial mining pool and involved representatives from notable bitcoin companies and members of the community.

Image via Shutterstock.

Correction: Since the publication of the article, CEX.io has changed its decision to implement a flexible fee system.