Have you seen Coinbase’s margins? They’re taking a bigger cut than any traditional financial actor, and the similar pricing from shops like Gemini suggest that the rest of the crypto industry is, also, rife with middlemen.
Those margins are absolutely incredible, Goldmanesque.
Heck it it were Goldman or JP Morgan running it, you have the CEOs dragged in front of congress being asked why they are robbing poor old grandma while she’s just trying to say trade cryptos
Those are middlemen for fiat-to-crypto transactions. No middlemen are needed for crypto-to-crypto transactions like with fiat-to-fiat transactions, with the exception of physical cash.
You gotta pay to get your transaction executed, the miners take that.
Right now transactions are heavily subsidized by the mining reward, at some point there will no longer be a mining reward so the whole thing will be only supported by transaction fees, and they are likely to be spectacular, even today with the low transaction volumes, actual transactions can sit in the mempool for quite some time before getting executed unless you pony up fees.
