Kraken has raised withdrawal costs to 0.0025 BTC ($7), at cutting-edge expenses, citing the cost as its average price of network expenses per transaction.
The exchange has instructed customers through email about the change in bitcoin withdrawal charges.
Why the change? Kraken always pays a miner fee that is sufficient to ensure transactions are processed quickly. However, the average miner fee required to prioritize and confirm Bitcoin transactions has been increasing for some time without a corresponding increase in the fee we charge to clients.
The bitcoin fees are also known as ‘miner fees’ they charge this fee for every bitcoin transaction so as to confirm your transaction by adding it to their next mined block. Higher fees mean faster confirmation because miners prioritize transactions to include in the block according to the fee amount.
Kraken added,
Note that the fee is static and represents our average cost per transaction, so the fee may not match the actual miner fee we pay in every case.
Statistics from Blockchain.info suggests that bitcoin miners are becoming paid more than ever, with over $1.8 million daily in miner fees.
Growth in community hobby and the upward push in network charges have seen other bitcoin organizations like Xapo, carrying over the miner price to its customers for outbound transactions.
“due to the increase in transaction volume of the bitcoin community, we’d like to give our users a few manipulate over their transactions. That being stated, Xapo will come up with the capacity to pick out which kind of price you’d want to pay – a standard or high precedence rate- for this reason allowing you to select how fast you’d like on your transaction to be processed,” Xapo wrote in an e-mail to clients.