The February edition of the CryptoCompare exchange review is out, and it finds that trading volume on surveyed exchanges increased slightly in February even as overall web traffic to those exchanges declined.
CryptoCompare found that web traffic to exchanges dropped 10% between January and February, while at the same time exchange volume was up for the month by 13%.
(source: CryptoCompare)
Cryptoasset trading analysts at TheTie.io recently compiled a report on this subject, namely on the disparity between internet traffic and exchange volume. Delivered as a so-called tweetstorm, TheTie detailed their analysis of which exchanges’ trading volumes were noticeably out of sync with each corresponding website’s traffic.
Based on an average trading amount per web visit, they found that some exchanges’ reported trading volumes were woefully greater than what could be expected by the global average. The vast majority of exchanges fell under some sort of suspicion, according to TheTie.
12/
In total we estimated that 87% of exchanges reported trading volume was potentially suspicious and that 75% of exchanges had some form of suspicious activity occurring on them.
— The TIE (@TheTIEIO) March 18, 2019
Indeed, the broader subject of fake exchange volume has become a regular theme in the cryptoasset industry. CryptoGlobe reported days ago on an investigation from Bitwise Asset Management, which found that as much as 95% of trading volume reported to the popular crypto statistics website CoinMarketCap could be fake.
USDT and Top Exchanges
Another notable takeaway from the February exchange guide is Tether’s ongoing resilience as the leading stablecoin of the industry, even as new options constantly emerge. An astonishing majority, about 98%, of Bitcoin trading into stablecoins uses Tether in favor of other stablecoins, according to the review.
Data show that exchanges trading USDT pairings against Bitcoin executed far more individual trades on average than those trading USD. But, inversely, some Tether-only exchanges such as LBank and CoinBene also boasted more low-frequency, high-value trading – fewer trades with higher values.
(source: CryptoCompare)
The top four exchanges by total volume were Bithumb, Binance, ZB and OKEx. But, as intimated above, the metric of exchange volume on cryptoasset exchanges is regularly criticized by observers. For example, right around the time that Bithumb surpassed Binance as the leading exchange by trading volume, it was also accused of producing inflated trading volumes through wash trading – which it denied.
