(31th-December-2019)
If the trade order is matched immediately against an order already on the order book, which is removing liquidity. A trade gets the maker fee if the trade order is not matched immediately against an order already on the order book, which is adding liquidity.”
Basically, if you want to sell/buy and you put the price such that your order will be executed immediately, then you pay lower fee (taker fee). Otherwise your order has to stay for some time and for the exchange it is less beneficial, in which case you pay the maker fee. Usually the maker fee is 2–3 times more than the taker fee.
These fees might change dependent on the amount of your order: the more you buy/sell the smaller the fee. Some exchanges only charge the taker fee, in this case the maker fee is 0%. See an overview of the fees per exchange here.
Fee #3:Cryptocurrency deposit/withdrawal.
Usually, deposit of a cryptocoin is free, but if an exchange needs to create a new address for your chosen coin, then they will charge blockchain (or network fee), see below. Withdrawals fee are depending on the crypto coin, for example Kraken charges for Bitcoin withdrawal 0.0005 Bitcoin and Binance charges twice as much 0.001 Bitcoin. Also some exchanges don’t charge withdrawal fee, for example GDAX.
Let’s have a real life example with fees of an arbitrage on Coinbase, where you can buy Bitcoin directly. Let’s say that you want to buy Bitcoin for 10,000 USD at Coinbase via credit card (because it is the instant way of buying crypto). Coinbase charges 4% for this credit card transaction, that means you have 9600 USD left to buy Bitcoin. The prices are following (on 31st August of 2018):
1 BTC = 7044,32 USD
1 ETH = 283,49 USD
1 ETH = 0.04032 BTC
The arbitrage opportunity is to buy BTC via ETH: 9600 USD -> 33,86 ETH -> 1,3653815 BTC, whereas if you would buy BTC directly you would get: 9600 USD -> 1,3628001 BTC. The gain from this arbitrage opportunity is 0.2581% (equal to 18,18 USD=0.00258139 BTC). If your orders are executed immediately, then 0% fees apply. However, if your order gets stuck in the order book, then the fee per 1 transaction is 0.3% (taker fee). Let’s assume that you have got lucky and do not have to pay transaction fees. In this case, you would need 22 transactions similar to these to cover the credit card fee for the deposit only.
Finally you need to pay the withdrawal fee. We suggest to use a wire transfer which has a little fixed fee (0,15€, 1£, 25USD).
You see, fees might be a profit killer, so you have to be very careful with the choice of the exchange.
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