I think it was Matt Levine (Bloomberg) who wrote recently that, if crypto is so amazing and efficient, why are the trading fees 100x higher than on regulated exchanges in the boring old world of traditional finance?
Turns out, there are enormous costs in managing the risks inherent in moving value in and out of various cryptocurrencies.
Can we compare like with like? At gate.io you can have the same access to the matching engine and market data as anyone else for free. At NYSE this costs literally millions of dollars per year. At gate.io a retail trader can place a standing limit order and a other retail trader can interact with it, and this is structurally impossible in US equities because US equities has built up an extremely costly infrastructure around extracting profit from retail traders while pretending that this is good for them by publishing papers calculating how much price improvement they received compared to lit venues where there is no retail taker flow. Commissionless stock trading generally costs customers more than commissions did. At gate and a few other venues, spot fees are 0 due to recent competition over this sort of thing.
I don't endorse depositing at any particular centralized crypto exchange. They might steal your money. The London Mercantile Exchange might also do that[0].
> At gate.io you can have the same access to the matching engine and market data as anyone else for free. At NYSE this costs literally millions of dollars per year.
It's not an apple-to-apple comparison because you can't trade the same products. It doesn't matter if a broker has the best features and the cheapest fees if it doesn't allow its users to trade what the majority of investors want to trade: regular stocks, ETFs, basically traditional financial instruments.
The same reasoning can be used for most blockchain products that seem to have an edge over the traditional solutions: they mostly exist in some virtual world, but once they try to connect with traditional finance and go through the corresponding legal hoops, they end up with a worse solution than what already exists.
Turns out, there are enormous costs in managing the risks inherent in moving value in and out of various cryptocurrencies.