One of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges in the world, British Virgin Islands-based Bitfinex has announced that it will add four new altcoins – ETH, IOTA, EOS, NEO – as trading pairs for Japanese Yen (JPY) and British Pound Sterling (GBP).
The move allows traders with fiat who want to purchase ETH, IOTA, EOS, NEO to skirt conversions into Bitcoin first in order to purchase these four other cryptocurrencies. With less reliance on Bitcoin as a trading pair, Bitfinex hopes to attract more investors.
Bitifinex has also opened the door to customers’ direct deposits of JPY and GBP in a strong push to make “cryptocurrencies more globally accessible.”
The new trading pairs are as follows:
BTC – BTC/JPY & BTC/GBP
ETH – ETH/EUR, ETH/JPY & ETH/GBP
IOTA – IOTA/JPY & IOTA/GBP
EOS – EOS/EUR, EOS/JPY & EOS/GBP
NEO – NEO/EUR, NEO/JPY & NEO/GBP
“The addition of these new trading pairs to Bitfinex will facilitate improved accessibility and convenience for traders, unlocking greater levels of liquidity for the exchange and the cryptocurrency market as a whole,” the company says. “The introduction of a greater number of crypto-fiat trading pairs, and the subsequent reduction of the reliance upon BTC as a medium of exchange, will work to greatly benefit traders while reducing the associated costs — in terms of both time and money — of trading digital assets.”
Wells Fargo ended its banking relationship with Bitfinex last April. Subsequently, the exchange began banking with ING, which confirmed to Reuters in an email that it has an account with Bitfinex in The Netherlands.
Bitfinex has been under scrutiny by US regulators because Bitfinex and Tether, a cryptocurrency stable coin that is allegedly back by the US dollar, share the same chief executive officer. Traders use Tether coins as a substitute for US dollars under the assumption that they are backed by dollars held in reserve. But Tether Limited has not issued an audit revealing the accuracy of such claims.
Without verification that Tether is pegged to the US dollar, there has been wild speculation that Bitcoin’s last great price surge to $20,000 in December of 2017 was largely due to false liquidity from Tether and a larger Bitfinex-Tether manipulation scheme.
