India’s Koinex rolls out zero-fee, crypto-to-crypto trading pairs

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As the cryptocurrency world continues to expand at a rapid pace, it is now the turn of Indian cryptocurrency exchange Koinex to introduce cryptocurrency trading pairs. Last week, Koinex announced that it would be introducing no less than 23 crypto-to-crypto trading pairs with no fees—an added incentive for new cryptocurrency investors who are hoping to enter the market in a big way.

Koinex was not the only exchange to introduce these pairs. Last week, another leading Indian cryptocurrency, Zebpay, also announced that it would be launching crypto-to-crypto trading pairs, but they only decided to launch one pair.

In its announcement, Koinex was quite bullish, boasting that it was the first exchange in India to launch such a large number of trading pairs.

“We are going live with not just one or two crypto-crypto pairs; we are launching a total of 15 token pairs, all at the same time. This is the largest crypto-crypto pair offering by any Indian exchange and to add to this, the trading fees will be zero,” Koinex wrote in a blog post.

Koinex added more cryptocurrency trading pairs on Saturday, and also confirmed the seller fee of 0.15% for the Indian rupee (INR) market as well as a flat buyer’s fee of 0.15%. Payments, however, are only accepted via the Netbanking gateway. According to Koinex, “all other payment methods are discontinued… All INR withdrawals are temporarily halted.”

Koinex currently trades 19 coins against the INR, with a market turnover of $5.5 million daily—far below the massive turnover of exchange giants such as Binance, which reportedly moves around $1.7 billion a day. The launch of the new crypto-to-crypto trading pairs is expected to raise domestic investor interest substantially. According to the announcement there will be nine bitcoin trading pairs, six Ethereum trading pairs and another eight Ripple trading pairs. Koinex is claiming that it is the first exchange to offer XRP-based trading pairs.

Trading pairs for the BTC market include Bitcoin Cash (BCH/BTC), Ethereum (ETH/BTC), Litecoin (LTC/BTC), TRON (TRX/BTC), Ripple (XRP/BTC), Omisego (OMG/BTC), EOS (EOS/BTC), Nucleus Vision (NCASH/BTC), and Request (REQ/BTC).”

For the Ethereum market, Koinex is offering trading pairs for BCH, TRX, XRP, OMG EOS, and NCASH, alongside BTC. For the XRP market, customers can trade BTC as well as LTC, TRX, EOS, OMG, REQ, NCASH, AE (aeternity), and GNT (golem). This is quite an interesting variety of pairs and should see a sharp uptake of interest in the Koinex exchange.

The launch of Koinex and Zebpay’s crypto-to-crypto trading pairs comes on the heels of the Reserve Bank of India’s announcement that local banks were forbidden from dealing with any entity that settles of exchanges cryptocurrency.

In response to the RBI order, Koinex said it has been looking for alternative solutions, like “introducing UPI payments or instant withdrawals or new tokens for trading.”

“As you know, the crypto-market has been in a disarray of sorts since the start of the year due to the ambiguous stand on crypto-assets by the government and situations further took a downward spiral with the RBI directive reprimanding banks from partnering with crypto-entities,” according to Koinex. “So the need of the hour in this uncertain market was a safer alternate trading format, like crypto-to-crypto.”