LocalBitcoins.com introduces deposit fees

LocalBitcoins.com, the over-the-counter trading service of local currency for bitcoins today announced updates to their transaction fee system due to the rise in Bitcoin network fees.

Deposit fees for incoming transactions have been introduced, while the company will lower bitcoin sending fees for all customers. The new fee system will be put in to effect around June 19th-21st.

With the old transaction fee system, users paid a transaction fee when sending bitcoins out from LocalBitcoins to a different bitcoin wallet. This fee covers the cost for LocalBitcoins to send the transaction and the costs to manage the deposit(s) used to send a transaction.

By introducing deposit fees customers who make many small deposits will pay a larger share of the overall transaction costs and customers who send out transactions will enjoy lower fees. All fees will be adjusted dynamically based on how congested the Bitcoin network is.

Outgoing transfer fees will be smaller

With the new transaction fee system, outgoing transfer fees will be smaller than with the old transaction fee system. Users can save further on the sending fee by timing a transaction when the network is quiet.

Size of deposit fees

Deposit fees will be dynamically adjusted based on how congested the Bitcoin network is. Deposit fees will be larger than the new sending fees, as of now it is expected to be about 3x the amount of sending fees per transaction.

Bitcoin network fees have been rising along with the Bitcoin price and other exchanges have introduced the same sort of dynamic and higher fee structures.

The LocalBitcoins team said:

“We try to develop tools that make our fees competitive while ensuring fairness in our transaction fee system. LocalBitcoins is committed to improving the situation. We’ll invest resources towards developing various offchain technologies, transaction batching and other tools to make using Bitcoin cheaper for our customers.”