The popular cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex opened its professional trading platform for everyone, eliminating the requirement for its customers to keep at least $10,000 in capital.
Bitfinex stated that this rule change is a result of an increase in demand from traders for their professional trading platform. Given the relatively high minimum capital requirements, the exchange is now aimed at retail investors. But more popular explanation is possibly the lack of clients in such a market at high stakes.
The platform introduced the requirement in November 2017, in fact, positioned itself as an exchange for professional traders, and therefore announced such a high threshold for entering the platform. CEO Jean-Louis van der Velde said that for the past six months, the exchange has been working on how to make its offer available to a wider audience.
"For the last six months, we have been working hard to ready our platform for a new wave of customer accounts and are now in a position to open Bitfinex to a wider audience."
In addition to eliminating a threshold of $10,000, Bitfinex also showed new improvements and features that were implemented on the exchange:
- Updated support center with automatic answers to frequently asked questions;
- New KYC portal for quick processing of customer identity documents using third-party tools;
- Information about the Santiment token, which is an educational section for each cryptocurrency available on the platform.
Since the cryptocurrency market is showing signs of rebirth, Bitfinex uses the opportunity to start working with retail traders, as well as catch up with competitors Coinbase and Binance. One of the notable trends that is currently developing in the cryptocurrency space is the growing popularity of the initial exchange offers (IEO). Demand is mainly determined by retail investors, and it is not surprising if Bitfinex offers a similar service in the near future.
