Coinbase introduces increased fees, other changes to Coinbase Pro

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“How To Win Friends and Influence People” by Dale Carnegie must not be on the executive required reading list at cryptocurrency exchange giant Coinbase (NASDAQ: COIN). The company recently decided to acquire a company that had a checkered past of possible human rights violations and hacking activity and the move stirred the hornet’s nest in a big way, with many calling for users to dump the platform. Now, the company has announced changes to its Coinbase Pro platform, one of which will be an increase in fees.

In a blog post from Friday, the company states, “On Friday, March 22 @ 6:00 pm PDT, Coinbase Pro will implement a set of changes to further optimize the market health of our platform. These changes are designed to increase liquidity, enable better price discovery for trades, and to make price movements smoother. This will lead to a more efficient market and increase trading opportunities for all of our customers.”

Coinbase Pro, in addition to Coinbase Prime, is going to bring to an end support for stop market orders that day, as well. From now on, all stop orders have to be submitted as limit orders and must include a limit price.

Market protection points that are provided to both Pro and Prime users are going to change, too. The points will be 10% for all market orders and any order that moves the price more than 10% will stop executing and a partial fill will be returned.

To implement the changes, the platform is going to be offline on March 22 from 6 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. Pacific Time.

Not surprisingly, the changes were not well received by the crypto community. Social media saw an influx of negative comments, including one by noted economist and trader Alex Krüger. He said on Twitter, “Coinbase Pro raising fees for smaller clients by 33% while lowering fees for larger clients,” adding that “in a rational world, most Coinbase users would now move to Binance.”

That move most like already began when Coinbase decided to acquire Neutrino and social media launched a #DeleteCoinbase campaign. The company has not been able to stop the campaign from taking root and it will almost certainly spread quickly as a result of the upcoming changes.