Many criticisms of cryptocurrency of the form, "...has x fraudulent facet..." also apply to traditional finance. What is being called "wash trading" in this article is called "algorithmic trading" on traditional asset exchanges, and is considered fair game/a bit funny (especially prior to the Jan 2022 decision to decimate all retirement portfolio growth due to QE).

The way this is dealt with on traditional markets is to simply draw a line on what trading is reported for mark-to-market (i.e., bids and asks for under 100 shares don't appear in the quote tick data). Other reactive measures such as circuit breakers like those bumped up against in March 2020 established due to the 2010 "flash crash" have also been put in place in traditional markets.

Forbes establishes a "proprietary" methodology to weight and attempt to sieve "real volume," which I can't agree or disagree with since it is opaque with regards to the precise implementation. Given the nature of their findings, I would call the title editorialized.