I say my dog is worth a million dollars. You say your cat is worth a million dollars. I trade you my dog for your cat. Then we trade them back.
We've just created 2 million dollars of daily trade volume, err, economic activity.
When looking at value stolen by scammers, what matters is not the daily trade volume, what matters is how much money was put into the ecosystem [1], and what fraction of it was stolen.
[1] Which is a lot less than 180B/day.
This is the rub. If you’re using mcap and mark-to-market rates for total value stolen, it’s completely reasonable to use the same rate to evaluate the size of the system.
https://dune.com/hagaetc/stablecoins
I guess you could argue the billions in daily transfers are wash trading, unless the transfer is part of an exploit, and then it’s not wash trading?
If dogs and cats were fungible, and there was a market for fractions of both that could be exchanged in and out of, and contained hundreds of thousands of USD in standing liquidity, and the value of your dog was $1 million, and the cat was also $1 million, then sure. Swapping the dog for the cat is approximated by $2 million to the same accuracy that many assets (houses, stocks, etc) are described in notional value.
Edit to downvoters: I actually meant it unironically. Thiefs often want to "cash out" as soon as possible. I'm not saying it's a net good, but it feels "real and gritty" as opposed to many other crypto transactions.
Uniswap liquidity providers charge a fee for every swap, proportional to the volume swapped, so faking volume like this would be prohibitively expensive.
So to what degree is trade volume indicative of anything in other things?