At the end of April, Binance made another change to its spot trading fee system. Notably, Binance has ended its “free trading” promotion for some trading pairs.
Binance previously listed FDUSD in an attempt to replace BUSD after it was discontinued. To stimulate interest in this stablecoin, trading pairs with FDUSD as the quoted asset are initially listed with preferential fees. In particular, the BTC/FDUSD pair is free to trade.
Once taker fees were reintroduced to the BTC/TUSD pair, the BTC/FDUSD pair became the only way to trade bitcoin for free on the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange. This has helped put this relatively small stablecoin in the spotlight.
It seems that in December, Binance made several other major FDUSD pairs also free to trade as part of a wider promotion.
FDUSD continues to increase its prominence on the exchange, with these stablecoin pairs accounting for over 35% of spot trading volume on the exchange in April, surpassing the peak of TUSD, Binance’s previous attempt to replace so BUSD. While in December 2022, BUSD pairs accounted for 39% of the trading volume on the exchange, FDUSD is proving to be a suitable competitor, managing to achieve its dominance in a much shorter time .
However, on April 25, Binance ended the free trading promotion for FDUSD, both with bitcoin and the pairs that were free to trade in December. There is still a zero maker fee promotion for all pairs, but a similar program exists for TUSD.
FDUSD dominance has decreased since the end of the promotion, but is still quite prominent, accounting for 33.55% of spot trading in June.
The popularity of the BTC/FDUSD pair does not seem to be decreasing. The pair reached a trading volume of 4.5 billion USD in the past 24 hours, compared to 2.5 billion USD for BTC/USDT and 9.6 million USD for BTC/TUSD. However, for other spot assets, USDT pairs dominate.
Trading in many FDUSD pairs is still a bit more profitable due to the lack of maker fees, but not as attractive as before. USDT is the larger and better known stablecoin, which has helped it maintain its popularity even without any incentives.
USDT pairs will likely face pressure in the EU on the exchange as it complies with MiCA regulation, although it is unclear how much of Binance’s volume comes from the bloc.
Either way, it seems like the end of free trading doesn’t have much of an impact on FDUSD.
You can see the coin prices here.
Qin Shi Huang
According to The Block
