More than 50% of transactions with bitcoin performed on centralized platforms do not make economic sense and are fictitious. Analysts came to this conclusion Forbes in a recently published study.
During the analysis, the publication studied the trading activity of 157 cryptocurrency exchanges. To evaluate the performance, we used information on licenses from regulators, statistics from services like Messari and CoinGecko, data on network traffic from SimilarWeb, and also conducted “dozens” of interviews with the heads of large companies.
According to the report as of June 14, 2022, the daily global trading volume in bitcoin pairs was $128 billion, which is 51% less than the $262 billion that can be obtained if you add up the values reported by the platforms themselves.
Analysts grouped cryptocurrency exchanges into three groups depending on the magnitude of the deviation of the transmitted indicators from the real ones:
- 0-25% – 48 platforms that generated a combined $39 billion in trading volume on June 14;
- 26-79% – 73 exchanges that generated $81 billion (against the declared $158 billion);
- 80-99% – the remaining 36 sites that generated $ 7.7 billion (against the declared $ 59 billion).
The second group includes developing companies that do not have reliable tools for tracking the use of fictitious trading practices (wash trading). The lion’s share of the third group is made up of “unregulated and small” cryptocurrency exchanges.
