It’s been a few days since Bitfinex listed Euro trading, so we now have some more data to work with. Even though the Bitfinex USD market is based on tether, and fiat deposits/withdrawals will remain severely restricted, the USD market is still much larger than the Euro market. At the time of writing, the current bid/offer for borrowing/lending Euros on Bitfinex is 0.012% to 0.0243% per day. There is 13,000 bid and 140 offered, so the Euro lending/borrowing market is wide and illiquid. This presents some interesting challenges and opportunities. For those of us capable of making a market (either manually or using bots) the wide spread is not such a big deal, at least as long as our volume doesn’t overwhelm the market. For my purposes, I’d put up to 10,000 Euros into this market before I’d start to worry that I can’t get the money out to lenders frequently enough to earn a liquid rate. But it’s a double edged sword, a choice of risk to reward, about whether to get the money out to borrowers or to try and catch a sucker rate.
I’ve also noticed that the volume offered in the Euro lending book on Bitfinex is kinked. There are only about 360,000 Euros offered at up to 0.08% per day (from a market of 0.025% per day) and then there ar an additional 10,000,000 Euros offered at 0.083% per day. So someone must think that there is some chance that this money will get taken at this rate and they are willing to let the cash sit on the exchange (with all those associated risks) until that time. It’s not my style of trading (I hate dead money), but it helps us get a sense of the possible outcomes (and the ceiling on rates).
A quick glance at the loan book total outstanding shows the USD amount at 461,787,500.86 and the Euro 190,431.82, so the Euro market on Bitfinex has a long way to go in order to catch up to the USD volume.
