According to research by the Blockchain Transparency Institute (BTI) group, only two of the twenty-five largest cryptocurrency exchanges do not artificially inflate trading volume in pairs with Bitcoin. The ranking of platforms compiled by BTI, based on real daily trading volume rather than on the data that crypto exchanges provide to CoinMarketCap (CMC), was topped by Binance. In CMC's analogous ranking the company occupied only third place at the time the research was conducted. Following Binance in the BTI ranking came Bitfinex and Upbit (10th and 15th place in CMC respectively). But, for example, the eighth by real daily trading volume turned out to be Poloniex, which according to CoinMarketCap should be in 58th place by this indicator. The Blockchain Transparency Institute (BTI), using its own methodology and tools that are not disclosed, discovered four different bot strategies used by cryptocurrency exchanges to increase trading volume. For the research, the leading trading pairs with Bitcoin from 25 exchanges were taken, and it turned out that only with Binance and Bitfinex the trading volume corresponds 100% to what is declared on CMC. In the BTC pairs of the crypto exchanges HitBTC and Huobi, real trades amounted to 25%, while for many this figure did not exceed 1%.
According to BTI's estimate, token listing fees have turned into a serious source of income for crypto exchanges. On average, the fee for listing a token on a platform is around $50 thousand; the institute is aware of payments ranging from 5 to 75 BTC. According to the researchers, the 50 leading cryptocurrency exchanges, which account for about 95% of total trading volume, received about $100 million in listing fees this year. Recall that earlier the Blockchain Transparency Institute (BTI) came to the conclusion that more than 70 of the top 100 crypto exchanges tracked by the CoinMarketCap service are involved in laundering illegally obtained funds.
