Big VALR fee changes coming

South African cryptocurrency exchange VALR has announced it will no longer pay commissions to market makers on several transaction types from 1 May 2024.

It is also increasing taker fees on spot crypto-to-crypto transactions, while decreasing fees on other transactions.

Headquartered in Johannesburg, VALR is South Africa’s largest exchange based on trading volume.

For exchanges to generate revenue, they take a percentage on every transaction.

Some offer differentiated fees for market makers and market takers.

Makers are users who inject liquidity into the market by offering cryptocurrency or other assets for sale at a specific price or by offering to buy it at a particular price.

This is called bidding and asking.

When a user bids, they specify the highest price they are willing to pay for an asset, whereas an ask specifies the lowest price they are willing to sell it for.

Market takers are users who complete the transaction the bidder or asker initiated.

They sell the asset at the specified price to the bidder or buy the asset at the specified price from the asker.

Some crypto exchanges charge symmetric fees to makers and takers.

For example, Binance charges a 0.1% fee to both the maker and taker for transactions below $1 million. Fees become asymmetric above that amount.

To incentivise liquidity providers, VALR has been paying market makers who use its Pro Trading platform a portion of the taker fee it collects.

From 1 May, only fiat pairs will still have market maker rebates. Fiat pairs refer to trading fiat currencies for digital assets, such as bitcoins for rands or vice versa.

The rest of the Pro Trading options will reduce the maker’s commission to zero and adjust the taker’s fee.

These include spot crypto-to-crypto pairs, such as ETH/BTC, perpetual future pairs, and USD-based stablecoin to USD-based stablecoin pairs.

These are the only transaction types that will see a change in fees.

The exchange’s deposit, withdrawal, instant buy, auto buy, and VALR Pay fees remain unchanged.

The table below shows the changes in VALR’s fees on its Pro Trading platform.