CEX.IO and Ghash.IO have announced several major upgrades including the ability for customers to make purchases using fiat currency for the first time.
The UK-based exchange is adding further currency pairs for the USD, its first supported currency, and is set to add the euro within a week, along with the introduction of considerably lower fees in some areas.
A focal point for CEX.IO recently has been criticism of its fees structure, which Cointelegraph among others noted was complicated and potentially poor value for money. News today reveals however that the issue is being tackled at its own expense.
“The company has signed up a mutual contract with a mining hardware vendor for shipping a range of the most powerful and efficient hardware equipment to CEX.IO data centers,” a press release issued earlier announced. “Moreover, CEX.IO came to terms of significant lowering of electricity expenses, which is an essential part of maintenance costs charged for hosting miners.”
The partnerships mean that in real terms customers will see maintenance fees cut from US$0.18 to US$0.105 per month on 1 GH/s (gigahashes per second) contracts from today.
“We are now facing tough conditions when the increasing difficulty and the low Bitcoin price have made cloud mining less profitable,” Smith said. “…Meanwhile, we overtake all the expenses for lowering maintenance cost for the cloud-based GHS up to the moment the new hardware is shipped to the doors of our data centers.”
The move comes as the Bitcoin scene in the UK goes through testing times, with many startups facing teething problems from financial regulators
CEX.IO CIO Jeffrey Smith remains buoyant, however. “Adding USD to CEX.IO gives us a strong push towards a full-operational exchange,” he said in a press release issued Monday. “Now we are even more into targeting the mass market and opening simple ways for buying Bitcoin.”
The current regulatory climate means that CEX.IO is not currently able to offer its service in US, but is “strongly moving towards the USA market to provide its services for US citizens,” it says.
- CEX.IO CIO Jeffrey Smith
There is no word as yet on when GBP will be added to the currency pool, but the exchange in the meantime has further improvements within its sights. Smith added:
“[… ]We will be implementing new cryptocurrencies on a weekly basis according to the list of coins mined on GHash.IO multipool, as well as to the most popular requests from our users.”
More details on CEX.IO can be found in our cloudmining review series available here.