This was one of the topics that was brought on a thread days ago and I thought that would be a good subject to talk about in this section since many beginners are actively viewing topics here, That's normal to look for better prices to buy or sell when you decide to trade some token/coin but I'm going to try and explain why it's not going to work on crypto 95% of the time or more...

Most of the exchanges except a few reputable exchanges have fake volume, It means if you decide to open an account in an exchange which has a lower or higher price for a token/coin comparing to the others there's a good chance that you can't buy or sell at the price that you're seeing on cmc or the exchange itself because it's just bot trading from the exchange itself to show good liquidity which isn't there, So if you try to buy or sell at the price that is being traded at that moment in an exchange your order wouldn't get filled because exchange bots only buy from/sell to themselves and ignore other orders.

You can check whether an exchange has a fake volume yourself, You should just take a look at buy and sell orderbook and have an eye on trade history which shows recent trades of that pair, If an order went through at a certain price and shown on the recent trades but at that moment wasn't on the buy or sell orderbooks it means they have fake volume, In these exchanges you can only buy from the sell orderbook or sell to buy orderbook, Buy and sell orderbook prices on these kinds of exchanges are usually way more different(worse) than the price that you're seeing being traded by bots and shown with shiny color, More importantly it means you will be buying higher or selling cheaper if you count the difference between buy and sell orderbook and the price you thought you would be able to trade at, Set aside the fact that there are issues with many exchanges like withdrawal problems when you need to withdraw and they ask for kyc all of a sudden or freeze your funds for all sorts of reasons.

So based on all that I wouldn't suggest anyone to just look for a better price in an exchange specially when it comes to crypto whether if it's for the purpose of arbitraging or simply just buying cheaper or selling higher and suggest you to go for more reputable exchanges because those nice prices actually don't exist.

This is probably among the most basic things which anyone that uses cryptocurrencies should know, if it's not in your personal wallet it's not yours yet, as simple as that, but surprisingly enough there are actually people that really think that their tokens/coins are totally safe in exchanges, if you ask those people why are they so sure and feel safe, most of them will probably just say because they trust the exchange or something like that.

Seems to me some people tend to forget previous incidents regarding exchanges getting hacked rather quickly, BitGrail hack that during the incident millions of XRB(Rebranded and known as nano now) got removed from their wallet and the cryptopia hack that happened recently and it wasn't even this exchange's first time that experienced an incident like this and then again people trusted this exchange enough to keep their funds on there, why would anyone trust an exchange with all those previous fishy incidents (like the time when they were having something around 1 month or even more for a simple withdarawal action) and such really?

I'm not talking about the amount that you are trading daily or weekly obviously, this is about medium/long term holds, the tokens, coins or even stable coins that you're not going to exchange them anytime soon, so just don't go ahead and put your life savings on exchanges and use them as a bank no matter how trusted and reputable that exchange is, you can only use your personal wallet (preferably offline) as some kind of a bank, even if we assume that one exchange is really trusted and they're not going to go offline the next hour or tomorrow there's still a chance (even if it's really low) that the exchange that is trusted by you and many others just gets hacked and all your funds on there goes poof.

This is really getting out of hand, Now every exchange that comes out of nowhere is faking their volume to show better liquidity in order to gain some users and the worst part is that it is getting quite common as if it's nothing serious happening here and now that market cap is plummeting it's getting worse and worse.

And i'm not talking about small amounts here, I'm talking about faking more than 95% percent of volume in almost every pair, The newer the exchange, the more bogus the volume.

An example to better understand the situation, You want to buy some tokens on said exchanges, the exchange shows the last trade on that specific pair was at 0.00001255 price and it was a sell , Let's say you put your buy order on orderbook on exactly that price so the order maybe can go through quicker, You wait for a while and you will notice that your order didn't get filled but at the same time you notice there are  same or lower bid prices than yours that are going through on trade history even tough these orders are nowhere to be seen on orderbooks before execution, Then you put a higher bid than that and again nothing will happen, This will continue until you decide to just take an existing sell order from the order book and get done with it.

It was just about two weeks ago that Upbit exchange got caught frauding trillions KRW on fake orders, Before this news this exchange claimed to have more than 90% of the total volume on a token(not going to mention the name for shilling reasons), It means this exchange stood higher in volume than other top exchanges that said token was listed on, They were simple minded enough to push their volume higher than old known exchanges by a huge difference.

The problem with all of this is mainly the trust issue that it causes, Cryptocurrencies are already struggling enough to adopt by consensus, Literally the first thing that someone wants to enter cryptocurrency trading or investing does is to buy from exchanges, And what happens if the first thing you encounter isn't something you would consider reliable and trustworthy ?

 

.....

...............