Bitfinex Review

Fees explained

As of September 2026, Bitfinex publishes zero maker and zero taker fees on spot and margin trades, with no 30-day volume tiers on the schedule at all (source: Bitfinex fee schedule). The cost has not disappeared, it has moved to funding: crypto and stablecoin deposits are free, but a bank wire costs 0.100% with a minimum of 60 US dollars or euros, and card purchases are priced by a third party that Bitfinex does not quote.

That is an unusual shape for a maker taker fee schedule. Most venues discount a headline rate as your monthly volume climbs, so a small account pays the worst price on the page. Bitfinex quotes one commission for everyone, and the number is zero.

The wire minimum is what decides whether the zero commission is worth anything to you. A 60 unit floor on a small transfer is a large percentage of a small transfer, and on a 1,000 dollar wire it is 6%. Above roughly 60,000 units the percentage rate takes over and the minimum stops mattering. Funding in crypto or in a stablecoin avoids the charge entirely, which is the route the schedule is clearly built around.

A cost estimate for a $500 purchase on Bitfinex and Kraken appears here once the published fee schedules are verified.

History and ownership

Bitfinex is a brand rather than a company name, and the entities behind it appear in regulatory filings rather than on the marketing site. A Commodity Futures Trading Commission order dated October 15, 2021 names iFinex Inc., BFXNA Inc. and BFXWW Inc. as the companies doing business as Bitfinex (source: CFTC press release 8450-21, October 15, 2021). Those are the names to search in a license register or a court docket. The same corporate group is associated with Tether, whose entities were charged in the same set of orders.

The company's most consequential episode in the public record is the New York settlement. On February 23, 2021 the New York Attorney General announced an agreement ending an investigation into Bitfinex and Tether, finding that Bitfinex had lost roughly 850 million dollars through its relationship with the payment processor Crypto Capital Corp. and that both companies had made misleading statements about their financial condition (source: New York Attorney General press release, February 23, 2021). The Attorney General's statement was blunt: "Bitfinex did not, in fact, know the whereabouts of all of the customer funds held by Crypto Capital." The companies paid 18.5 million dollars, agreed to stop all trading activity with New Yorkers, and agreed to submit quarterly reports on account segregation and asset transfers and to publish disclosures of the assets backing tethers.

Bitfinex remains privately held. There are no audited public financials and no quarterly filings of the kind a listed operator produces, so the New York reporting obligations are among the few recurring disclosures attached to the group.

Products and markets

As of September 2026, Bitfinex's public configuration endpoint lists 183 live spot pairs across 84 base assets, once the 14 paper-trading test pairs are set aside (source: Bitfinex public API, exchange pair list). Eighty-two of those pairs are quoted in US dollars, 68 in Tether, 20 in Bitcoin, five each in euros and pounds, two in Tether Gold and one in Ether.

That is a comparatively short list, and it is worth reading against the funding page, which advertises crypto deposits in "over 200+ supported digital assets" (source: Bitfinex deposits and withdrawals page). The two numbers are not in conflict, they measure different things: an asset you can deposit and withdraw is not necessarily an asset with a live order book against a currency you hold. Check that the pair you want to trade exists before you move funds in.

Alongside spot the venue runs margin trading, and the fee schedule prices spot and margin together at the same zero rate. Bitfinex also issues the Tether-branded tokens it supports directly, listing USDt, CNHt, XAUt and MXNt on the deposit page. Anyone entering in fiat should note how thin the fiat side is: five euro pairs and five sterling pairs against 82 dollar pairs.

Security record and custody

The enforcement record RampAtlas could open runs to two settled matters, both from 2021, and both are about conduct rather than a breach of the platform.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission order of October 15, 2021 found that Bitfinex "offered, entered into, executed, and confirmed the execution of illegal, off-exchange financed retail commodity transactions with U.S. persons" and operated without the required registration (source: CFTC press release 8450-21). Bitfinex paid a 1.5 million dollar civil monetary penalty. Tether paid 41 million dollars in the same set of orders over its reserve claims, the order finding that Tether "held sufficient fiat reserves in its accounts to back USDT tether tokens in circulation for only 27.6% of the days in a 26-month sample time period from 2016 through 2018."

The New York settlement described above is the second, and it is the reason New Yorkers cannot trade here.

On custody itself the ordinary cex position applies and is worth restating on a venue with this history. Bitfinex holds the private key, and your balance is a claim on a private company rather than an asset you control. Anything you intend to hold rather than trade belongs in self custody, where the seed phrase is your responsibility and no counterparty's failure can reach it.

Deposits and withdrawals

Bitfinex accepts bank transfers in euros, US dollars and pounds, card payments in the same three currencies, and crypto deposits in more than 200 assets including its own Tether tokens (source: Bitfinex deposits and withdrawals page). Fiat withdrawals are supported in four currencies: "Bitfinex supports fiat currency withdrawals in USD, EUR, GBP, and JPY." Japanese yen appears on the withdrawal side only.

Card funding is the gap in the published pricing. Bitfinex routes card purchases to the third-party processors Mercuryo and Simplex, and tells you to "check with each payment processor to see rates available" rather than quoting a rate of its own. That means the all-in cost of a card purchase here is not published anywhere on the exchange, and RampAtlas records no card figure rather than guessing at one.

The sensible route is the one the fee table rewards. Move value in as crypto or a stablecoin for nothing, or send a wire transfer large enough that the 60 unit minimum is a rounding error, then trade at zero commission. Funding a small balance by card or by wire undoes the entire advantage.

Support and usability

RampAtlas could not assess the support experience. The Bitfinex help centre returned an error to every request from our infrastructure in September 2026, so the verification-level articles, the country availability articles and the response-time commitments went unread. No claim about support quality appears on this page in either direction.

The usability picture from the pages that do load is of a venue built for people who already know what they are doing. The public pages price margin alongside spot as a single product, the fiat side is narrow, and the marketing centres on a zero-commission order book rather than on a one-tap buy screen. A first-time buyer is better served by a venue that publishes its card rate, its verification tiers and its served countries in a document you can actually read.

The United States is the one jurisdiction with a clear published position, and even that comes with a caveat. The banner on the Bitfinex Securities El Salvador property states that "the Bitfinex Securities Trading Facilities and other Services are not offered or made available to Prohibited Persons, such as U.S. Persons, or Persons present in the U.S. or any other jurisdiction where the offer or sale would be unlawful." That wording sits on the securities site rather than in the exchange terms of service, which could not be fetched, so RampAtlas treats the United States as not served and flags the source. See United States for what that leaves open there.

Verdict

Bitfinex suits an experienced non-US trader who funds in crypto or in a stablecoin and wants a zero-commission order book with no volume tiers to climb. On that route the published trading cost really is nothing, which almost no mainstream venue matches.

It is a poor fit for a first purchase. The wire minimum punishes small fiat transfers, the card rate is set by someone else and published nowhere, the fiat pair list is thin, and the documents that would tell you which countries are served and how customer assets are held could not be opened. Two settled 2021 regulatory matters sit in the public record, one of which closed the platform to New Yorkers. Anyone comparing venues on published, readable terms should start at Compare.