#CryptoFees101 CryptoFees101

Irrespective of whether your crypto portfolio is up or down, it’s certainly making someone else rich. When Coinbase went public, they were valued higher than the three largest stock exchanges in the world, combined.

These exchanges are so richly valued because they charge more than 50x as much in fees as traditional financial exchanges. That’s real money out of your pocket and why we are going to breakdown these fees to help you understand the main costs of trading, holding and using crypto.

To make it easier to understand, we are going to split the fees into ones assessed by the exchange you are using, and the ones assessed by the blockchain ledger itself.

All exchanges usually make money from your trades in two ways. On the left is Coinbase’s fee disclosure highlighting the trading fees. The fee is comprised of two portions a Spread and an Order Fee (they call this the “Coinbase Fee”).

Order Fees/Transactions Fees

Order fees are pretty straight forward, they are a fixed or variable fee charged for each trade. Above you can see how Coinbase has fixed thresholds up to $200 and 1.49% of the total beyond that. This is assessed on every trade, buy or sell.