- Actual trading data from 160 exchanges does not correspond to their claims
- Some exchanges’ BTC trading volumes are 95% less than reported
Bitcoin trading data from as many as 160 exchanges does not correspond to their claims according to a recently published report from Forbes Magazine’s digital asset branch, CoinTelegraph reported.
Binance and Bybit claim more than twice the volume
Forbes contributor Javier Pax reported some exchanges’ Bitcoin trading volumes were 95% less than what they reported, while exchanges like Binance, which operate with little to no regulatory oversight, claimed to have more than twice the actual volume.
Binance claimed trading volume of $217 billion, while in reality, it was just $89 billion.
Fake volume
Pax said:
More than half of all reported trading volume is likely to be fake or non-economic. The global daily Bitcoin volume for the industry was $128 billion on June 14. That is 51% less than the $262 billion one would get by taking the sum of self-reported volume from multiple sources.
He added:
If reported trading volumes for Bitcoin, the most regulated and closely-watched crypto asset around the world, are untrustworthy, then metrics for even smaller assets should be taken with even greater grains of salt. At its best, trading volume is one of the most measurable signs of investor interest, but it can be easily manipulated to convince novice investors that it has much more demand than it actually does.
According to a 2019 report from Bitwise Asset Management cited by the contributor, 95% of the reported crypto trading volumeon unregulated exchanges was the result of non-economic wash trading or was faked.
In a February 2022 report from Chainalysis, wash trading isbecoming an issue for NFT investors, but most people conducting such trades were not making a profit.
