Bitstamp Scraps Plan for Inactivity Fees After Users Revolt

Bitstamp last week made what the company called a “hard decision” to levy a monthly fee on inactive users with smaller balances.

Now it’s walking things back.

The Luxembourg-based crypto exchange today announced that after widespread backlash, it’s scrapping the idea.

“We have heard the response from our customers,” Bitstamp CEO JB Graftieaux said today in a statement to Decrypt. “We have taken everyone’s concerns onboard and have decided to cancel the Inactivity Fee.”

The plan was to charge non-U.S. customers who had balances of less than 200 euros a 10-euro monthly fee if 12 months elapsed where they hadn’t staked any assets or made any trades, deposits, or withdrawals.

The fee would have gone into effect August 1.

Bitstamp users were not pleased.

But Bitstamp’s reversal doesn’t change the underlying market conditions that pushed it to consider the fee.

The company announced the fee last week amid a steep decline in trading volumes at major exchanges, and one of the worst selloffs in the history of the broader crypto market. In the last two months, Bitstamp has seen a 47% decrease in daily trading volume, according to data from CoinGecko.

At the time of the announcement, the company insisted in a blog post that while “nobody loves fees ... in order for us to continue providing great services to all our customers, we made the hard decision to implement the inactivity fee.”