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Comment by seydor | Hacker News Reader

Binance had 4.17 trillion trading volume in the past 7 days

The SEC lawsuit, which alleges (among other things) Binance as having lots of wash trading on their platform, still hasn't been resolved.

Using statistical methods, for BTC, ETH, LTC, and XRP, Binance wash trading was estimated at >50%.

https://www.nber.org/papers/w30783

You can see other pairs on Binance that are clearly more. For example, GAS is the 9th "most traded" token on Binance. It claims ~$100M in daily volume, but there's not even $1M in liquidity between +/- 2% of spot. That is almost certainly all wash trading.

https://www.coingecko.com/en/exchanges/binance

Binance volume numbers are not believable.

If you and me traded 1 dollar between us 4.17 trillion times (all electronic, we could probably do more), we would have the same trading volume.

I could generate $4.17 trillion in trading volume with myself if the cost of a transaction is updating a row in a database. This statistic doesn't mean anything in isolation

What you're describing is called wash trading.

Which was 99.9% of the NFT market. I wonder how much of it is the crypto market. Probably not much lower.

Well, to everybody else, trading volume means between different entities, so your loophole probably isn't all that relevant

What if you own both entities? And you also own an exchange where the trading happens, so you give them both special Black Friday deal: 0 transaction cost for the next 12 months.

I don’t really mess with crypto anymore, but back when I did, literally every transaction I ever made was with myself. I literally never spent any on a good or service.

I read that exchanges inflate these numbers in different ways, so it can be very misleading.

Apparently sometimes this goes very wrong [0].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36610006

Trading volume should not be confused with real transactions.

And what part of the economy did that facilitate?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com