The New York State Department of Financial Services (NYDFS) has issued an industry letter warning virtual-currency businesses that advertising “no-fee trading” while leaving out costs such as spreads and markups can amount to deceptive marketing. The industry letter, dated November 12 and signed by Acting Superintendent Kaitlin Asrow, applies to every virtual-currency business the department licenses or charters in New York, from BitLicense holders to limited-purpose trust companies. New York became the first state to require a dedicated license for virtual-currency businesses when it began issuing the BitLicense in 2015, and industry letters are the department’s standing tool for spelling out expectations to those licensees between formal rulemakings. Because serving New York customers requires holding one of those authorizations, the letter reaches some of the most heavily used retail crypto platforms in the country.

What the letter asks firms to do

The department lists examples of content it treats as deceptive. One is a statement that gives a false impression of overall competitiveness by advertising the absence of a single charge — “no-fee trading” is the cited example — while omitting other costs the customer bears, such as spreads or markups. The letter does not ban spreads or markups; it objects to advertising that hides them behind a waived commission.

Every claim in marketing material must be evidence-based and verifiable, and the firm must retain that evidence. The letter ties this obligation to the existing recordkeeping rule for licensees, 23 NYCRR 200.18, and also requires copies of all marketing approvals to be kept on file. Policies covering content, disclosures and review must be approved by the board or a board committee every year. A footnote widens the net further: anything a firm presents as a “fee comparison” or as “education” counts as marketing if it could reasonably be read as promoting the service.

Firms have six months to comply. Policies consistent with the guidance must be available for departmental review from May 12, 2027, the date given in the letter itself, although the accompanying press release states May 10. The department says it will test how the policies work in practice through examinations and supervisory monitoring. Under the footnote, that scrutiny covers the pricing pages, comparison tables and explainer content customers already see, not only conventional advertising.

Where the money goes when the fee line says zero

A trading fee is only one of three places a customer can pay. The other two never appear as a line-item deduction, which is exactly why the letter singles them out. Only the first of these is zero when an app advertises zero fees. The other two determine how many tokens actually arrive in the account, and neither can be read off a price chart: a chart plots a midpoint or a last trade, not a price at which a customer can fill a specific order right now.

What Coinbase and Robinhood put in writing

The two largest US retail venues describe this cost structure in their own disclosures. Coinbase’s pricing page states that simple buy and sell orders include a spread in the quoted price, and that eligible Coinbase One transactions carry zero trading fees while that spread stays in place. Coinbase Advanced works differently: customers trade directly on the order book, with no Coinbase-added spread but with trading fees charged on each order.

Robinhood’s US routing disclosure, updated June 15, 2026, says that for orders sent to market makers the company receives $0.95 per $100 of executed order value, and that this amount is included in the spread. Customers can instead choose exchange-routed orders, which carry a separate fee schedule and no rebate from the partner exchange. Robinhood states that either route can turn out cheaper or more expensive on a given order and that neither is guaranteed to deliver better pricing.

The NYDFS letter names no company, and neither page indicates a violation. They are cited here because they show, in the platforms’ own words, where a cost lives when the fee line reads zero.

$1,000, two quotes

Take a token trading around a reference value of $100 and a customer with exactly $1,000 to spend, fees included. Route A charges no commission but quotes $101. Route B quotes $100 and takes a flat $2.50 from the budget first. Both quotes are available for the whole order at the same moment.

Route A’s cost shows up as fewer tokens rather than as a line item. Its 1% premium leaves the customer $9.90 short of the reference value — four times the $2.50 that Route B displays openly, which works out to a quarter of one percent of the budget. The example holds prices still, assumes both venues can fill the full order, and leaves out funding, subscription and withdrawal charges. The reference value is a yardstick for comparing the two routes, not a price anyone is promised on resale.

What “cheaper” now has to prove

An app that waives commissions can say so truthfully. What changes under the letter is the step from that fact to a claim of being the cheaper place to trade, because a cheapness claim is a factual claim, and a factual claim now needs retained evidence that would satisfy an examiner. A comparison built on one order size or one routing path says little about a customer trading a different size through a different path, and the letter’s own example reads most naturally as the typical retail order, where spread and markup are the whole cost.

The footnote on “fee comparisons” closes the obvious workaround. A comparison page that lists competitors’ commissions alongside a zero while omitting the firm’s own spread is marketing material under the letter, and it goes through the same review, approval and recordkeeping as a billboard. The evidence a firm keeps on file has to cover the customer the advertisement is aimed at, not the customer for whom the numbers happen to work.

The check a buyer can run

The test a regulator will now expect a firm to document is one any customer can perform before confirming an order: how many tokens does the same total budget buy through each available route? The quotes must be taken within moments of each other, use the same funding method and cover the full size of the order. A subscription belongs in the total if it was bought to unlock the trading perk; a withdrawal charge belongs in it if the coins are moving to another wallet; nothing should be counted twice if the quoted total already includes it.

A cheaper quote that never fills costs more than a worse quote that does, so the figure worth comparing is the all-in price of a trade the customer can actually complete. Coindoo’s guide to the cheapest ways to buy Bitcoin walks through how the purchase screen and the funding method change that number.