Cryptocurrency volume trade is rigged. The situation in a nutshell.

Evan Ducktator
3 min readApr 12, 2019

According to The Wall Street Journal and Bitwise Asset Management, “Nearly 95% of all reported trading in Bitcoin is artificially created by unregulated exchanges”.

I needed a couple of bottles of wine and a week of existential crisis before I could realize this discouraging information. When I went through all the stages of grief I asked myself “What the F???” and decided to grapple with this issue by myself.

Is this data really such a fake?

To start with, all the statements about such new and unstable industries as blockchain and crypto should be checked twice. All the information about bitcoin falsified trading volume data was represented by Bitwise Asset Management. Their report was sent to SEC and that is how this story started. What is even more interesting, this company has already tried to submit an application to SEC. All they asked for was permission to launch Bitcoin-ETF and included the info about “fake” btc volume trading to it’s application. What a twist!

So we can see Bitwise Asset Management motivation clearly: they just want to get rid of their competitors. Nice try.

Who makes excuses?

CoinMarketCap admitted that there could be some “inaccuracy” in data collection. They suggested the users should decide what indicators reflect all cryptocurrency trading realities. However, it has never occurred to them to give up the unreliable sources.

So what? Nobody cares

Due to all the “fake” bitcoin trading volume a question appeared: what is the real btc dominating index? Researcher John-Paul Thorbjornsen claims that “it is at least 80% in March of this year, although CoinMarketCap names a figure of only 50.7%”.

We could expect that, after all those news, the trust in the whole market could be undermined. But it didn’t happen. Moreover, BTC stayed stable and altcoins went green. What a twist!

What’s next?

All we can do now is wait for halvening. The info about how many blocks in a blockchain left can be traced in real time mode. In May 2020 miners will need to accept the fact a new block will cost 6.25 btc.

Analyst Saifedean Ammous stands that “Bitcoin is a completely new animal, different from everything before it. Your old toolbox for analyzing bubbles, currencies, and stocks doesn’t work on it.”. So he can’t tell us what will happen next. I can’t tell you what will happen next. Nobody can. And if there is a person who is sure about the whole industry future, don’t listen to that person. He probably is a scammer.

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