How can Bitfinex afford zero trading fees? Answer: their >$5 billion margin lending business Not only do they take a cut of the interest earned by lenders, but they can safely put a large % into time deposits or even gov bonds as Tether does to earn even more They can easily earn $250mil/year just from the above ... and with zero fees, they are likely to attract far more volume, which means more deposits and potentially more borrowers too Assuming infrastructure holds up under far larger volume, they may be able to disrupt the market and become integral for other CEXs, OTC providers and DEXs for liquidity(Alistair Milne)