Bitcoin Forum

the Blockchain Transparency Institute (BTI) has released its December 2018 report on exchange volumes data
Full article here ->> https://cryptoscanner.co/article/?article=BTI-Report-A-Majority-of-the-Cryptocurrency-Exchanges-Fake-the-Trading-Volumes-Data

we can see only a few exchanges doing a fair play job, what a disgrace...

https://i.imgur.com/izB5Knu.png

It's really disheartening to find out that due to the fact there is a plethora of exchanges and more competition,some exchanges have to go through shady means of establishing fake volumes simply to attract investors.
I'll advice investors to always do good quality research before trusting an exchange,cos most of them put up falsified records and so called trading volumes
From this chart we can see clearly that's it's only two exchanges that have actually put up 100% real/correct trading volumes,which doesn't speak well of this network.

i have no doubt many (and perhaps most) exchanges engage in volume manipulation. people have been analyzing and reporting on it for years. exchanges like huobi and okcoin used to report millions of BTC in volumes every day, so this is not a surprise. exchanges want to show high volumes to attract new customers.

having said that, i'm also very skeptical of this report. the authors are anonymous, hidden behind a private domain registry with a new website. the fact that bitfinex and binance are touted as the only "legit" exchanges makes me think the report was funded by bitfinex or tether (or produced by someone intent on promoting them).

There should be reasonable doubt to everything, especially in crypto circle.
So I doubt every exchanges's trading volume(they need volume to attract traders, traders need to find a reason to believe new thing.)
and I doubt this report, too. 8)

right now, it is a great time for trader to do cross exchanges arbitrage trading among these exchanges.

Yes, but its difficult unless you used a bot to automate everything.

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Yes I have read the reports last month and I'm not surprised that most exchanges really go to this tactics. Perhaps they wanted to show to the traders that they have huge volumes and are trusted, or maybe they are part of the bigger problem in crypto space which is market manipulation.

I'm extremely surprised to see that Bitfinex are "legit" exchange on the report. How can this shady company who have many issues about transparency is a legit one?

Nevertheless, it's clear that wash trading happens nearly everywhere.

correct thought
I had the similar doubt in my mind

this kind of articles are needed to make scams run to the surface and put in front of the public eyes

If this report is anything to go by, its something disappointing and ts going to continually reduce the trust in the market because if something as simple as trade volume can be manipulated to give certain impression, I wonder what else could have been mis-represented. This is further point to the direction that lawlessness abounds in the market because the moment there is a body ensuring that they file their returns and pay taxes based on the volume of transactions reported, they would be more careful than this rather than the current anomaly being paraded by majority of all of them.

In such a situation on the cryptocurrency market and Bitcoin, I am not even surprised at such news - the exchanges lose as well as the course of Bitcoin, and of course they need a deception to attract traders to their side.

From what I know the US Government have begun their investigation about this matter since 2017 but ever since then I haven't heard any follow up news regarding with the matter. This is obviously illegal as they are misleading the market for their own personal gain, fake volumes like this don't happen in the stock market the only way to "fake the volume" the the data is if you literally buy and sell in the market. I don't know their ulterior motive behind this but the government needs to have a serious action about this one.

we have a market that is not yet totally regulated, we have sites like coinmarketcap where the exchange that is in the top has more exposure, and this gives you the right to charge more money for each altcoin to be listed in your exchange. The exchanges are on the battlefield and use dirty means to be on the top. If appear websites that monitor if any exchange is falsifying its volume then it will be a good thing, the problem will be if such a site does not become corrupt

I doubt that was a shock to any of us. However I wonder what could be gained from doing 90%+ wash trading. I mean I understand maybe 5% or 10% more to pass your opponent so you can seem like leading the market or making like 20% so you can be in top 5 or whatever. However, making up 90% is not a good marketing strategy. Everyone knows you are not as good as you promote yourself to be and it makes you look like a liar and make your exchange a lot more shady.

If I see binance 181 but in reality they are doing 170 instead, I wouldn't mind that 10 difference, they can do that to keep their spot. However if I see something higher than binance but no one is talking about it and no one is using it, than I would assume that exchange is scamming people and would be keeping my distance from it.

I think it will be better if we post a full report image of 25 cryptocurrenct exchange.->>Click on it to see image<<- (https://s3.cointelegraph.com/storage/uploads/view/2c263f32f1aa00afb4a7ce168ba57cbc.png)
Seems Binance, Bitfinex and Liquid are considered as an only legit exchanges which I don't agree to but as you see BTI claims so.
davinchi
You are right but some people trust volume but if there isn't any source online where people talk about exchange, then I wouldn't start using it, also to be fair sometimes coinmarketcap is doing shit job, for example they don't care which exchanger lies and also once they removed some exchanges which caused change in bitcoin's price.

Thats nothing new , i think they need to do it to survive in market like this . Imagine if there was no bots trading / fake volume by exchanges . Will you be able to trade with alot of tokens ? I Don't think so . I dont like bots and fake volumes ofcourse and im not a trader . Guess it will take some time to get rid of bots and fake volume when stock traders transfer to crypto trading =D

I've updated the first post with the detailed picture
Tnx.

only vigilant investors will survive the fraudsters, this is useful for those who are new to crypto trading, sometimes fraudsters have many ways, even the crypto market can be the best place to cheat investors with fake volumes,

How the hell this "Blockchain Transparency Institute" managed to get all that data?Is this data even real?
Are they spying on crypto exchanges?How are they spying?What tools are they using to analyze transacitons and distinquish fake from real trading volume.Do they have acess to the scripts and API of all crypto exchanges?

If you will read the report itself from their website:

https://www.blockchaintransparency.org/


So it's a combination of investigative work and surveillance on their end. It's a very tedious job, but the output is something that we can really ponder. Specially for those exchanges that we have suspected to be doing wash trading, but we don't have the evidence.