At some point A lot of Ethereum holders, developers and enthusiasts are going to have to come to terms with scaling issues. This major announcement by Bitfinex is huge. Seeing a major exchange building on EOS will open up a lot of new eyes to the power that is EOS.

You might not know it but ETHFINEX already exists

If you read on the ETHFINEX website you will find a part about decentralization.
"Based on Bitfinex’s trading engine experience and customer base, we believe that fully decentralized models for exchange are not yet mature or scalable".

Well they did not think that Ethereum was ready to be scalable and now have made an important announcement about a new exchange they are launching . This announcement marks the first time a major exchange plans to build a product on EOS. This shows the confidence that Bitfinex has in the EOS platform and also brings attention to the fact that people don't have to wait much longer for a scalable decentralized exchange.

In order to continue pushing the boundaries of market leading services, EOSfinex will combine the scalability and speed of EOS.IO with Bitfinex’s industry-leading expertise to deliver an “on chain” exchange designed to offer a fast, transparent and trustless platform for the trading of digital assets.

A continuous goal of Bitfinex has been to research and sandbox the capabilities of various protocol-level technologies that meet the rigorous requirements of a high volume, blockchain-based trading platform. This vision has led us to EOS.IO, whose goal of processing tens of thousands of transactions per seconds, with minimal fees and confirmation times, is heavily aligned with our ambition.

The Awakening

The entire crypto world will soon be aware of the potential that EOS offers and that we can have scalable blockchains much sooner than most imagine. The fee structure of Ethereum with the need of gas makes Ethereum in its current state not suitable to handle a large volume exchange like Bitfinex. Another thing to take note of is that this also means that Bitfinex will need to hold a significant amount of EOS tokens to handle the bandwidth for this project. I can also see Bitfinex trying to campaign as a witnesses for the EOS blockchain.