Transak — Reduced fees

Transak
4 min readMay 2, 2020

We’re reducing our fees for Transak. Commissions are now:

In this article we will explain why we are reducing fees. We will also provide transparency on exactly how your final price is calculated.

For the latest on our payment methods and fees see here.

Why Transak is reducing fees (and why we’ll keep reducing them)

Quote from Sami Start, Co-founder of Transak

The problem — in order to use a blockchain application, a user has to go to a 3rd party exchange. Fees on a $200 transaction from a major exchange are currently 1.5%. (At the time of writing) you can earn 3.73% per year a popular DeFi app, Compound. That means it would take you over 5 months of interest just to earn back the commission that you paid on buying the crypto in the first place.

On top of that, if you want to access a token that is not listed against fiat on a major exchange then you have to make 2 transactions, sometimes on 2 different exchanges — one to buy a major cryptocurrency and then another to trade that cryptocurrency for the token of an emerging project.

On top of that, accessibility varies country-by-country.

This goes against the very ethos of crypto — open, global, integrated.

Transparency on our new fee structure

Transak has 0.5% commission on GBP and EUR and a 0.25% commission on INR for bank transfer payment methods. There is a minimum charge that covers costs such as gas fees from DEXs and banking transaction costs. The minimum cost varies as it is calculated dynamically by our backend. We are pushing to reduce the minimum fee over time, which are mostly coming from smart contract gas fees currently. Let’s go through a few examples:

Example 1 – Buying 500 GBP of ETH

0.5% of 500 GBP is 2.50 GBP. This is greater than the minimum fee so there are no other costs.

Example 2 — Buying 150 EUR of ETH

0.5% of 150 EUR is 0.75 EUR. The minimum fee in this case (calculated dynamically) is 1.10 EUR. So Transak selects the greater of the 2, which is 1.10 EUR. This is effectively 0.73% commission.

Example 3— Buying 1,000 INR of ETH

0.25% of 1,000 INR is 5 INR. The minimum fee in this case (calculated dynamically) is 13.41 INR. So Transak selects the greater of the 2, which is 13.41 INR. This is effectively 1.34% commission. As you go for a smaller amount that the percentage commission increases slightly.

Conversion Rates and Slippage

Transak is transparent in its pricing and does not charge additional spreads on top of conversion rates. The conversion rate comes from pricing feeds from major exchanges, OTC desks and DEXs. We are constantly adding new liquidity sources to Transak.

However, sometimes there is some ‘slippage’ on the price. This happens when the price that we fetch for the user’s order is worse than the top of the order book of the exchange with the best price at that moment. This usually happens on less popular cryptocurrencies that have less liquidity. That why we added the ‘Slippage’ indicator. This gives the user a warning if the price is not good.

Even though there is slippage, the Transak price may still be the best you can get. This is because you may have to pay fees and transaction costs on 2 different exchanges as you buy a major cryptocurrency with fiat and then trade the major cryptocurrency on another exchange for the desired cryptocurrency.

Try it!

You can use Transak to buy crypto with 🇪🇺 EUR, 🇬🇧 GBP and 🇮🇳 INR (more coming soon). Check it out here: https://global.transak.com.

Integrate it!
Applications can integrate their own fiat gateway with Transak here: https://transak.com/integrate.

About Transak
Transak is a single integration for applications to accept fiat-to-crypto deposits and withdrawals from a global user base. It does this by aggregating local compliance, payment methods and liquidity from around the world and putting it in a simple integration. The Transak product is a widget or API that can be integrated into an app in just a few lines of code. Transak is backed by Consensys and graduated from the Tachyon accelerator program.

To learn more about Transak, visit: https://transak.com/

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