The news about Ethereum (ETH) taking over Bitcoin (BTC) swiftly circulated in the crypto community, but almost everyone took it with a grain of salt. While Ethereum did surpass Bitcoin by trading volume in 2017, Ether was nowhere near the king of crypto this time, since a single Chinese exchange reported more than $5 bln of fake volume.
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A skyrocketing volume
Ethereum’s current daily trading volume is comfortably sitting at $1.5 bln, but it experienced some serious turbulent activity yesterday peaking at almost $8 bln. Remarkably enough, Ether’s price wasn’t even remotely affected by such a sudden increase remaining in the $470 range.
As it turned out, a Chinese exchange Exx, which already has a pretty negative reputation, was behind this short-lasting ‘success.’ The ETH/USDT trading pair was responsible for 77 percent of the aforementioned $5 bln volume. This is clearly the result of trade mining, since there is no way a single trading pair from one exchange can generate such a large amount of money.
Fraudulent Chinese exchanges
CryptoComes has already reported on how some new cryptocurrency exchanges (the overwhelming majority of which come from China) engage in wash trading to artificially boost position on CoinMarketCap. BitZ, Exx, RightBTC– the armada of these fake exchanges significantly tarnishes the reputation of the crypto industry.
CMC also suffers from wash trading, since it faces sharp criticism from those who accuse it of presenting misleading information. The biggest crypto tracking service promises to tackle this problem as soon as possible.
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Yuri Molchan
Gamza Khanzadaev
Dan Burgin