BitFinex, a cryptocurrency exchange company based in the British Virgin Islands, created the requirement of $10,000 in minimum equity for opening accounts from the 1st of January of 2018 but now it appears to be turning back on its plans as it announced on Tuesday, 9th of April, that it was eliminating its $10,000 minimum equity threshold in order to open Bitfinex to “a wider audience.”
The company’s blog post said that from today, the “$10,000 minimum equity threshold” is eliminated, thus “opening the world’s most advanced trading platform to everyone.” and it clearly expressed that this change “comes in response to overwhelming demand over the past six months from a wide variety of traders seeking to access the unique professional experience available at Bitfinex, but without requiring the upfront equity.”.
“We simply could not ignore the increasing level of requests for access to trade on Bitfinex from a wider cohort than our traditional customer base. 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. By dropping our minimum equity requirement, the only limits are now set by the traders themselves.” Jean-Louis van der Velde, the CEO at BitFinex, said.
According to the exchange, the update gives an answer to increased demand over the last 6 months, a sign that the sector is starting to prepare for another bull run and it has maintained that “overwhelming demand from a wide variety of traders” is responsible for the change.
It was clearly stated that the modification will not come alone, as other improvements include an upgraded support center, a new KYC portal and a sentiment token information site.
The said changes in clear terms include:
- migration onto self-designed, dedicated servers with premium hardware for advanced security and lowest latency.
- Upgraded Support Center — redesigned for a more intuitive user experience, offering automated responses to common queries, and quicker issue resolution.
- New KYC Portal — updated infrastructure to enable the implementation of third party tools making the process more frictionless in the near future.
- Sentiment Token Information — provides education on every token on the platform to help inform customers.”
In reaction to this development, BitFinex CTO, Paolo Ardoino in his tweeter handle had written: One of the main reasons of this change is to get more dev community more involved. @bitfinex is quite significantly dev driven at its core and we want to let other devs building/contributing easily on/to our ecosystem.
