CoinJar, an Aussie based firm providing a global account for spending, sending and trading bitcoin, pounds, and dollars announced today an introduction of fees for on-chain bitcoin transfers to begin starting April 3rd.
The company will charge a fixed amount of 25 CoinJar Reward Points or a 0.0005 BTC fee per transaction (around .50 cents). This will enable CoinJar to continue subsidizing fees at a more sustainable rate while being competitive in the fee market. Subsequently, this will result in quicker confirmation times when sending bitcoin.
To help the transition, new and existing users with CoinJar Rewards activated by April 17, 2017, will receive a one-off 100 point bonus. This is equivalent to four free bitcoin transactions.
If you already use CoinJar exchange services or CoinJar Swipe, by activating your Rewards account, users will still be able to continue sending bitcoin transactions at a fraction of the cost it normally would.
The combination of a rise in the bitcoin price, the cost of relaying transactions, and the increased number of transactions have seen a massive spike in covering costs. While this current increase is not indicative of how bitcoin’s fee structure will look like in the future, what it does reflect is that totally subsidized transactions on CoinJar are unsustainable for the company (and most payment and wallet services) at this point.
The CoinJar team said:
“We strive to solve user experience hurdles with creative approaches in the digital currency space. CoinJar’s vested interest in the bitcoin scaling debate is to advocate for the end consumer. A large and diverse user base of digital currency holders is just as an important part of the Bitcoin infrastructure as Bitcoin code and mining.”
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