At the end of April, Binance made yet another change to its spot fee tiering. Binance notably ended its "zero trading fee" promotion for several pairs.

We have talked about Binance and FDUSD in the past, as Binance seemed to relist the stablecoin in an attempt to replace BUSD after it got shut down. To drum up excitement for the stablecoin, which it previously delisted in favor of its own stablecoin, the pairs with FDUSD as their quote asset were initially listed with favorable fee rates. Most notably, BTC/FDUSD was free to trade.

After taker fees were put back on the BTC/TUSD pair, it made BTC/FDUSD the only free way to trade bitcoin on the world’s largest crypto exchange. This helped propel the relatively small stablecoin into the spotlight.

It seems as though in December, Binance made a number of other major FDUSD pairs also free to trade as part of a broader promotion.

FDUSD continued to gain prominence on the exchange, with pairs of the stablecoin accounting for over 35% of spot volume on the exchange in April, outpacing the peak set by TUSD, which was Binance’s previous attempt at a successor to BUSD. While in December 2022, BUSD pairs made up 39% of volume on the exchange, FDUSD was proving to be a suitable competitor, managing to amass its dominance in a much shorter time.

However, on April 25, Binance ended the zero fee FDUSD trading promotion, both for bitcoin and the pairs made free to trade in December. There is still a zero-maker fee promotion on all the pairs, but a similar promotion still exists for TUSD.

FDUSD’s dominance has been waning since the end of the promotion, but it remains quite prominent, on pace to make up 33.55% of spot trading in June.

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The popularity of BTC/FDUSD does not seem to be dissipating, though. The pair did $4.5 billion of volume in the past 24 hours, compared to BTC/USDT’s $2.5 billion and BTC/TUSD’s $9.6 million. Yet, for other spot assets, the USDT USDT pairs dominate.

It is still slightly more favorable to trade in many FDUSD pairs due to the no-maker fee, but it is not as strong a draw. USDT is the larger and more well-known stablecoin, which has allowed it to remain favored even without any incentives.

USDT pairs might eventually face pressure in the EU on the exchange as it looks to comply with the MiCA regulation, although it's unclear how much of Binance’s volume comes from the European bloc.

Regardless, it seems that the end of free trading didn’t impact FDUSD all that much.

This is an excerpt from The Block's Data & Insights newsletter. Dig into the numbers making up the industry’s most thought-provoking trends.