Leading cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex announced the withdrawal of half a dozen crypto trading pairs by the end of January 2022, citing low liquidity levels. According to the trading platform’s official statement, the measure is aimed to consolidate and improve liquidity, enabling users a more streamlined and optimized trading experience. Following are the trading pairs that are planned to be removed.
pNetwork [PNT/BTC], [PNT/ETH]; Basic Attention [BAT/BTC], [BAT/ETH]; Streamr [DATA/BTC]; Metaverse [ETP/ETH]
The crypto exchange noted that the underlying tokens have not been delisted and are still available for trading on Bitfinex. It reminded its customers to cancel any open orders with the above trading pairs before 31st January 2022 [Monday] since all remaining open orders will be canceled by the system itself. Further, the post informed that from 17 January 2022 at 10:00 AM UTC onwards, users can only reduce their margin positions in PNT/BTC, PNT/ETH, and ETP/ETH.
Having said that, Bitfinex announced that it is discontinuing services in the Canadian province, Ontario.
Bitfinex issues notice to Ontario users
Bitfinex on the same day announced that it is making ‘changes’ to the Services provided to its Ontario customers. The trading platform informed that users who met the following conditions will have their accounts closed by March 1, 2022. It also advised them to withdraw their funds on or before March 1. Bitfinex did not specify the reason behind the move, at the time of writing this news.
It needs to be mentioned that the region’s financial agency, Ontario Securities Commission [OSC], has been responsible for coming down hard on a number of crypto exchanges operating in the area, like OKEx, Bybit, etc. On top of that, Canadian cryptocurrency exchanges hint at a biased treatment as they allege that Crypto.com, a Singapore-based trading platform is freely expanding its services across the nation without any approval from the local authorities.
Michael Arbus, CEO at Bitbuy stated,
It is hard for Canadian crypto companies to compete with these unregulated multinational platforms, like Crypto.com, and their massive marketing budgets on our home soil. This allows these international platforms to market a lot of coins and products that our Canadian regulators would never approve if they were licensed.