What are the best cryptocurrency exchanges? A review from real-world experience

In the the last post ‘How do ICO/IEOs really work? Learn the inside story from real world blockchain (DLT) experts Part 3 — Avoid ICOs / IEOs that do not have a clear business model’, we detailed some of the issues concerning the listing of altcoins or cryptocurrenies such as the Seed token on cryptocurrency exchanges. In our experience, the regulatory issues, costs and overall ethical practices of most of the cryptocurrency exchanges are dubious. We are publishing this blog to get your feedback as we explore the options available to us. This blog focuses on exchanges.

Looking for the right exchange is a long and time-consuming process, not to mention a potential disaster for the business. We entered discussions with several exchanges that turned out to be inadequate in several ways.

Here is an example of an exchange that was introduced to us recently:

• Shortex: we were approached by Shortex and spent time in discussion with them about their offering here: https://shortex.net/fundraising. They asked us to give them $12k in return and guaranteed to raise at least that, or give the money back. Before making any decisions, we decided to look into them a bit further- and there were a lot of inconsistencies:

1. They claim they have 500K investors base. This is their Similar Web profile:
   https://www.similarweb.com/website/shortex.net
   No more then 300k visitors per month, and has recently dropped to as low as 15k. Plus average time of visit is 1–2 minutes. Moreover if you take a look at their volumes on CoinGecko (https://www.coingecko.com/ru/обмен/shortex), you will find out that they significantly inflate their volumes.
2. They claim that the biggest IEO raised $1M (Revoil). Here is the situation they have at the moment: https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/revoil
   Only one pair with no volumes and no liquidity in the order books.
3. Project YAYR (500k were raised) is the first one in their example book — it can’t even be found on Google.
   In their presentation deck, the PlanMyTrip project allegedly has 150k of funding. However, on the website it says that 600k was raised… (https://shortex.net/launchpad?utm_source=coincodex)
   Moreover, there is no info about these examples or Shortex Launchpad on ICOBench.
   Perhaps this information is incorrect and these projects are as they claim, but we would not start a relationship based on these grounds.

These smaller exchanges are the right place to build up community engagement and organic trade. However, the order books for most of them are artificial which means we would a) potentially devalue our business b) could have regulatory consequences in the future c) participate in practices that go against the true value of Seed and our values as a brand and community.

We want to build something of true value so when you trade/exchange it’s based on a real economy with real world value rather than just speculation.

We are now looking at other options. These include:

• Launching our own internal exchange, through off the shelf software that we can configure
• Continue to build out the loyalty programme and keep the Seed token internal and offer OTC trades via Huobi or alike
• Introduce a secondary, perhaps, stable coin for exchange with Seed. List on a decent exchange that will promote the token legally and reflect our values for a reasonable price

We have already researched various exchanges- here are some of the ones we’ve looked into so far:

Notes

• The CoinGecko TrustScore (beta) takes into account multiple metrics in the liquidity, API technical coverage, and scale of operations categories to make for a more robust ranking that is less prone to volume manipulation. We are uncertain whether a rating can be paid for, however, our experience with ICO Rating seemed to suggest that is the case.
• ICO Rating is based on user reviews of the level and quality of exchange services. For a certain amount they did say they could also review our token and use of blockchain technology.
• ‘Suspected fake trade volume’ means that we spotted discrepancies between reported volume and Similar Web traffic, or that the exchange offered us market making services, or that the exchange was called out for fake volume in the Bitwise report.
• Livetree Trust Score — takes into consideration CoinGecko’s TrustScore, ICO Ratings, and our own experience with the exchange

This is where you, our community, can make a difference.

Over the next posts we will continue to explore our plans, so if you have any advice or can recommend a good exchange, please let us know! We are open to suggestions and would love to hear what you think.