https://medium.com/@coinmarketcapped/An interesting article I picked up on medium. Disclaimer - This is not my content. I have no affiliation with the content, just sharing what's been out there in public in case you guys missed it.
CoinMarketCap.com is LYING to everyone while profiting from it.
It has come to our attention that CoinMarketCap.com, the Number 1 website in the crypto-currency industry, is showing immensely fraudulent and scam information (on purpose) to its users. As a site that is used frequently for reference points by many news organisations, trading outlets, companies, informational sites and individuals, we thought it would be in the best interest of the community to write about what has been really going on with this “trusted resource”.
Please note, our research indicates that multiple attempts to fix information by many coins on CoinMarketCap.com through contacting them through their support requests or online social media sites such as BitcoinTalk.org, reddit.com and other places has gone unanswered, ignored and/or explicitly overlooked/denied. By explicitly overlooked/denied, we mean that after contacting their support with up-to date and obviously correct information, they refuse to update the data. Many hundreds of coins on CMC are affected very negatively (or positively) by this. A lot of them have given up trying to get CMC to put correct data on their site, and have made sticky posts in their own respective forums as to this issue instead.
We also believe that there is massive insider trading going on with the employees, owners and others involved with CoinMarketCap. Our research, including talking to multiple coin creators, shows anomalous buying of coins between times that the coin creators asked CMC to list their coin (through their google form) and between when it actually gets listed on the site. This could mean that CMC insiders know that certain coins will pump, and go on a buying spree to front-run the listing of the coin and the public market sentiment. This can be seen over and over again when analysing the action on coins when being listed.
Pump and dumps are also being actively allowed and managed by the team at CMC without the knowledge of the coin creators or coin communities themselves. This can be seen by the direct manipulation of the circulating supply of some coins. CMC puts the circulating supply as very high at certain points (increasing the market cap), then drops it down to a much lower number later (lowering the market cap). This moves these coins up or down their numbered list causing massive buys and sell offs at the whim of CMC. Luckily this fraud can only be made to happen once or twice with each coin as the public outcry from the coin communities (sometimes) usually puts an end to it one way or other.
There is also evidence of CoinMarketCap effectively “killing” off coins as it sees fit. How does it “kill” a coin? Well it removes it’s circulating supply to “?” or a very low number arbitrarily, and keeps it there for a prolonged period. As the coin goes lower and lower in the rankings, daily volume on the coin dies off until such a time that it is zero (even though the teams behind the coins are still active and growing their ecosystems). This leads to exchanges delisting the coin, and the ecosystem being entirely dead after a period of time. There is plenty of evidence of coin communities complaining and coin creators “begging” CMC to update their information with no luck. CMC literally decides which coin lives or dies with it’s own agendas. In defence of CMC, some coins do lose their circulating supply due to faults of the coins (the data end-points for circulating supply stop working on the servers provided initially by the coins), but many are brought down even with the objections and outcry of the coin creators and communities behind them.
Also of concern is the possible bribery of CMC officials and other nefarious behaviours that could very obviously be extrapolated from their current actions. What if one coin paid a handsome sum to CMC to make sure a “competitor” would have lower market cap? How do you make them have a lower market cap? Easy, refuse to update the circulating supply to what the real numbers are and instead show an arbitrary number of their choosing. This can also be seen on many of the coins listed on CMC. There is ample evidence of coins complaining publicly on many forums yet CMC taking it’s own numbers without any explanation or acknowledgement.
Another area of concern is the outdated/incorrect information of many of the coins listed on CMC. Official coin links being broken or unresponsive, including the main websites, wrong daily volumes (not updated in days or weeks), and hugely different circulating supplies (from those you can officially see on the respective blockchains of the coins themselves) are just some of the additional problems that ring alarm bells with us.
Because of these issues, (and many others including the pseudonymous nature of the founders and team members) we believe it is in the best interest of the entire community to get behind this initiative and make big noise until such a time that CoinMarketCap updates their site to show correct information, or another resource is created/promoted that shows correct and up-to date data on their website. Number 1 can go down to Number 0 very quickly in the space with the right community backlash.
Some may say that these issues may be due to incompetence of the team at CMC or them having limited resources. One of the parts of our analysis will take a much closer look at what kind of income CoinMarketCap really makes. You would be surprised. CMC is one of the most profitable businesses in the entire industry. The user is the product. The ads are the money maker. There are backroom deals, and much more happening beyond the scenes that the public does not know.
Most people here are concerned about centralised mining cartels, hardware producers, banks, governments, regulators and/or core developers being points of issues in this industry. We strongly believe that none of those come even close to comparing to the obvious fraud that has been going on at CoinMarketCap for many years.
The volume of money that is traded on information taken from CMC alone pales every other issue into oblivion. If traders are making buys and sells according to falsified data on CoinMarketCap.com, then they are being manipulated and lied to in one of the biggest frauds in the entire crypto-currency space.
We’re not just shocked at the level of incompetence, negligence, fraud, and outright lying that CMC perpetuates, but at the lack of information about this so far in this industry. For a community that prides itself on self-regulation through transparency and openness, it should be ashamed at not having blown this massive fraud into the public eye much sooner.
We owe it to the community to make sure resources (especially the Number 1 site in the industry) are not being placed in positions to freely commit fraud on this scale ever again.
Because of the importance of this topic, we are not just going to make comments, we will provide proof. Please wait on the follow up posts for more information. This has been a very intense effort in data gathering, reporting and analysis, so we will provide irrefutable proof of at least some of the fraudulent actions of CoinMarketCap in follow up articles.
Thanks for reading and stay tuned for some eye-opening information. We hope this series of posts gets the attention that it deserves. Only then will CMC clean up their act. We hope.
-CoinMarketCapped (CoinMarketCap’d)
Twitter: @CoinMarketCapd
ADDITIONAL: If you are a coin creator or community member who has more information regarding the frauds and outright lying committed by CoinMarketCap.com please feel free to send us a DM/Tweet on Twitter or make a comment below.
