Payments platform Strike has announced that it will allow U.S. customers to buy and sell Bitcoin with almost no trading fees from today.
In an announcement on July 1, Strike founder and CEO Jack Mallers launched a salvo at leading U.S. cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, stating that his platform will set out to be the “cheapest and easiest place on the planet to acquire BTC."
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The move also puts Strike in direct competition with Jack Dorsey’s Square and with PayPal, which started offering crypto assets within the platform to U.S. customers in November 2020.
The announcement stated that the firm has launched the “Bitcoin Tab” enabling the ability to buy Bitcoin on Strike with “no fee outside of the market spread.”
The Chicago-based payments firm stated that it would charge a maximum “execution cost” of around 0.3% for brokering BTC trades, looking to drop that to below 0.1% over the coming months as volume grows.
Popular trading app Robinhood also offers commission-free crypto trading in select states. More than 6 million new customers bought crypto on the platform within the first two months of 2021.
Mallers is taking aim directly at Coinbase with the move, labeling its excessive trading fees as “asinine”. He pointed out that Coinbase made $1.8 billion in revenue in the first quarter of 2021, with $771 million in profit, 94% of which coming from fees as high as 3%.
He was highly critical of the exchange’s free giveaways which award users with a couple of dollars worth of altcoins for watching videos.
“Make no mistake, when you buy Bitcoin on Coinbase, you are supporting shitcoins.”
Related: Coinbase could see fee compression in long term, CEO expects
There was also a dig at PayPal which he stated has also recently hiked fees across the board, and now charge sellers 3.49% + $0.49 to process crypto transactions.
Mallers added that the aim is to drive prices in the market as close to nothing as possible, which would be in keeping with Bitcoin’s ethos.
“Our mission is to secure financial freedom for all, and we won’t stop until we do so for all 8 billion people on the planet.”
As reported by Cointelegraph, Strike has entered into a partnership with the El Salvador government to assist with its Bitcoin adoption rollout.
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