About 95 percent of bitcoin trading volume is a hoax, new study shows
Nickie Louise
Posted On March 22, 2019
Nearly ninety five percent of bitcoin trading volume is faked by unregulated exchanges, according to new findings detailed in a 227-page report by Bitwise, a crypto asset management firm. The report casts new doubts about the popular digital currency and the volatile cryptocurrency market.
The report, which was submitted to the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), is part of a proposed rule change for its application to launch a Bitcoin (BTC) Exchange Traded Fund (ETF). The firm analyzed the top 81 crypto exchanges by volume on industry site CoinMarketCap.com. The study finds that only $273 million of the $6 billion in aggregated average daily bitcoin volume, is legitimate.
In the process of trying to list the first-ever bitcoin exchange traded fund (ETF), Bitwise submitted application to the SEC that included a report with analyses that could help SEC regulators make informed decision. As part of the report, Bitwise collected and analyzed Bitcoin trading data, over four days in March, across 81 cryptocurrency exchanges. Bitwise later looked for patterns that show real and artificial trading. In conclusion, the firm found that 95% of the reported trading volume of these exchanges were questionable, including “patterns that indicated the trading on them appears manufactured.”
“People looked at cryptocurrency and said this market is a mess, that’s because they were looking at data that was manipulated,” says Matthew Hougan, global head of research at Bitwise.
“The fact that a significant portion of the reported daily volume in bitcoin is demonstrably fake will be unsurprising to many in the industry. Market participants have long understood, and experienced first-hand, that a substantial portion of reported volume is fake. This report is simply the first time that the data has been comprehensively assembled and analyzed to formally corroborate those anecdotal suspicions,” according to Matthew Hougan, Bitwise’s head of global research.
