Chasing fake volume: a crypto-plague

Interesting analysis that brings up the debate of unregulated markets.

A further question this raises is; if so much of the volume of a considerable number of exchanges is fabricated, when (not if) this gets discovered in the mainstream, will the price and prospect of cryptocurrencies come crashing down even further?

It's quite obvious that every crypto trader and exchange would check what's not allowed on "real" exchanges and do exactly that.

White label exchange providers openly advertise wash trading as a feature. Also many provide liquidity from other exchanges so using aggregate market cap across exchanges is extremely inaccurate.

Idk about this guy’s methodology. Falls apart in the last section because Binance does not have much wash trading going on, whereas HitBTC is full of fake volume wash trading. It’s easy to observe the wash trading directly, if you watch the books you’ll see instantaneous matches in between the best bid/ask. Shame they decided to use this “marketing hack” rather than offer a competitive product.

(Binance wash trading has most likely been seen in their trading volume “win a Porsche” etc giveaways.)

Huobi and OkEx have been doing this for years and years. The CEO of Binance had a nice (now deleted) rant on reddit, calling them out for this. Solution: Don't use the sketchy as hell exchanges