To me it shows that: 1) Anyone can start an exchange (unregulated market) 2) Some exchanges are shady and untrustworthy
It's not that "most transactions are fake volume". Its that if you aggregate the data, you include a lot of bad data.
I think you misread/misquoted me. It's that 85% of the major exchanges are mostly fake volume, and that 95% of all transactions are fake volume. It's in the article.
So, it's not 85% of the major exchanges, it's 85% of the exchanges top ranked by CMC's volume as reported by the exchanges themselves. Anyone could create an illusion of an exchange and do a fake-generated behemoth of an exchange within a couple months.
The majority of the top-ranked CMC exchanges are just fake-volume generators making money from all those ICO tokens/altcoins that hope that getting listed will help their price, or most commonly just sell more of their tokens to more uninformed victims.
For most of those exchanges you can't even find a single human name throughout their site. There was a big rise of using white-label crypto-exchange products, so you don't need much to get one of those online, they even provide "liquidity" network.
It's a shitshow, but it's irrelevant or a useless detail to bitcoin's value and trading, most big firms like DRW/Cumberland etc. breath this things and I'm sure they have talked to their SEC buddies about it.
Was not able to see it here: https://www.sec.gov/comments/sr-nysearca-2019-01/srnysearca2...