Two Exchanges Overtake Binance on CMC Rankings, But Research Suggests Volume Is Fake

Today, on March 21, both LBank and Bit-Z overtook leading exchange Binance on the adjusted trade volume cryptocurrency exchange rankings on CoinMarketCap, but research published on March 18 by the Tie suggests most of their volume is fake.

According to data contained in the Tie research, Bit-Z's expected 30-day volume is only 0.79 percent of its reported 30-day volume.

The aforementioned CoinMarketCap page attempts to filter out artificial volume and wash trading, resulting in a value closer to the real trading volume.

Still, data uncovered during research recently conducted by the Tie suggest that CoinMarketCap's system didn't filter out fake volume in the cases of LBank and Bit-Z. According to the Tie's data, LBank's expected trading volume amounts only to 0.9 percent of its reported volume.

Bittrex, reported $138 traded per visit, Coinbase Pro $341, Bitfinex $862, and Poloniex $63. To calculate the expected volume, the researchers used a weighted average of the trading volumes per website visit across Binance, Coinbase Pro, Poloniex, Gemini and Kraken, resulting in $591 and multiplied this number by the web views.

The Tie noted that they selected "These exchanges because of large usage among institutions, reputation within the market, and because their web viewership appeared consistent with their reported trading volumes."

LBank's estimated reported volume per website visit amounts to $65,850.

The exchange's reported trading volume in the 30 days prior to the research is $12.16 million, while the expected 30-day volume is just over $110.54 million.

As Cointelegraph recently reported, according to the data reported by the research, 86.57 percent of the total volume on all cryptocurrency exchanges is fake and three-quarters of them has unusual volume.

In January, two leaders of the South Korean cryptocurrency exchange Komid were reportedly sentenced to serve jail time for faking exchange volumes.