Alternative rating of crypto exchanges

Two thirds of the leading crypto exchanges are suspected of money laundering, inflating daily trading volumes and fake ratings.

The rating of cryptocurrency exchanges CoinMarketCap still raises many questions. 

The administration of the site has more than once had to justify itself in publishing false information on the volume of exchange trading and thus facilitating hasty and ill-considered transactions. The accusations forced the analytical service to add new markers and adjusted volume data. However, the new methodology did not add either transparency to reports or trust in crypto exchanges.

Blockchain Transparency Institute (BTI) conducted research on 130 crypto exchanges and came to disappointing conclusions. As before, the trading volumes of more than half of the crypto markets are unprecedentedly inflated. According to researchers, the daily trading volume is overestimated by more than $6 billion.

According to the new BTI rating, the winner was Binance, Bitfinex took silver, and researchers gave bronze to the leading American exchange Coinbase. Bithumb managed to gain a foothold in fourth position, leaving the South Korean giant Upbit far behind. The latter is dropped to 16th place and, despite the lack of complaints after a recent audit, according to BTI Upbit exaggerates its daily volumes by 11 times. Top 10 crypto exchanges that provide correct trading figures from blockchaintransparency.org:

Among the anti-leaders crypto exchange BCEX, with overstatement of data by 22 thousand times, LBank (4400), Bit-Z (469), ZB (391) and Bibox (more than 85).

Unlike CoinMarketCap ratings, BTI refused to include clone exchanges created as a carbon copy in the list. Therefore, the alternative BTI list does not include many well-known sites included in the top twenty of CoinMarketCap.

This is not the first accusation against the popular analytical service CoinMarketCap. In the spring, there was a whole anti-advertising campaign accusing the service of fraud and data manipulation. At the beginning of the year, the service was accused of manipulating the crypto market, after excluding large Korean exchanges Bithumb, Coinone and Korbit from the calculation of weighted average prices for leading cryptocurrencies.

Against the background of information about the use of the “pump and dump” scheme for making money on social networks, all accusations of CoinMarketCap may be not without reason. According to the latest information, in the first half of this year alone, trading groups earned $825 million.., in social networks due to manipulation of the stock exchange rate.