BTI Claims Only Bitfinex, and Binance Are Reporting Accurate Trade Volumes

Following its Exchange Volumes Report of Dec 2018, the Blockchain Transparency Institute (BTI) has revealed that only Binance and Bitfinex are reporting actual trade volumes. According to the report, the top five crypto exchanges (except the two) are involved in wash trading in a bid to inflate their trade volumes.

Wash Trading is a market manipulation technique in which a trader simultaneously sells and buys the same digital asset to create an artificial activity in the market.

The BTI report highlights that four different bots are used in inflating the exchanges’ trade volumes, with the settings constantly changing depending on the market trends. BTI further claims that only 1% of the trade volumes reported by the top 25 exchanges on CoinMarketCap are genuine.

Below is a screenshot from the report showing the real volume of the exchanges.

Source: BlockchainTransparency.org

According to BTI, OKEx has been one of the most affected exchanges, with their top 30 tokens being engaged in wash trading. However, OKEx remains among the top 10 exchanges in trade volumes, even after adjusting the volumes.

BTI further claims that Huobi and HitBTC are wash trading their top 25 pairs, but at a lesser level compared to OKEx.

Bithumb is also washing trading several assets, including Zcash, Bitcoin Gold, Dash, and Monero. However, the wash trading on Bithumb appears to change every month.

Based on the data, over 80% of the volumes reported on the top 25 BTC pairs on CoinmarketCap are wash traded. The exchanges are using these techniques as a business model to benefit from aspiring token projects.