Hong Kong-based bitcoin exchange Bitfinex has announced its support for Ether trading. On Monday, Ether trading started against both US dollar and bitcoin, allowing customers to deposit Ether into their exchange wallets.
“While we are generally wary of adding new digital assets to the platform and believe that Ether’s future as a store of value is quite uncertain, it is, nonetheless, hard to ignore the Ether trading volumes at other exchanges and the many requests we have received from our customers to add Ether trading pairs”, Bitfinex said in a statement.
The company also intends to enable shorting and margin trading on Ether, however it said that this will depend on the community’s support for Ether trading on its platform.
“Assuming strong adoption of Ether trading on our platform, we could enable shorting and margin trading in less than a week”, it added.
Bitfinex further said that the kind of leverage ratios permitted on Ether remains uncertain at the moment. However, it suggested that it may initially allow less leverage as compared to bitcoin, due to Ether’s considerable volatility relative to bitcoin.
It added that it will be offering introductory pricing on both Ether pairs in a bid to boost its Ether markets.
“Through the end of March, it will be free to add liquidity (market maker) and 20bps to remove liquidity (market taker). Trading volumes in Ether during this time will not affect volume tiers for bitcoin and litecoin, but after March, Ether will be part of the existing aggregated volume pricing tiers”, Bitfinex added.
Bitfinex platform allows users to easily exchange USD/BTC, USD/LTC, USD/ETH, LTC/BTC, ETH/BTC and with minimal slippage. The company said it is actively pursuing the addition of Euro trading pairs as well.
The Bitfinex announcement boosted ETH price, taking it to a high of $15.02 on March 13th, up from $11.26 levels seen on the previous day. It currently trades at $12.24 levels, at the time of writing. In addition, Ethereum market cap also surpassed the $1 billion mark, however, it has retreated from that figure and currently stands at $964,432,198.
