The Blockchain Transparency Institute (BTI) has just published a new report of the top 500 coins in the market, ranking them by wash trading volume. This report shows that of the top 10 biggest coins in the entire crypto market, the Binance Coin (BNB) and XRP are the assets with the lowest amount of wash trading for the month, with 39.34%. This is another win for the Binance which recently deployed its own Binance chain and a decentralized exchange.
Top Wash Traded Coins
Still, within the top 10 cryptos, the list of wash traded coins ranked from the least to the most, along with their wash trading percentage, is as follows:
- Binance Coin (BNB) – 39.34%
- XRP – 56.79%
- Bitcoin Cash (BCH) – 57.31%
- Cardano (ADA) – 63.21%
- Stellar Lumens (XLM) – 64.85%
- Bitcoin (BTC) – 65.21%
- Tether (USDT) – 67.58%
- Ethereum (ETH) – 73.08%
- EOS – 75.91%
- Litecoin (LTC) – 76.72%
What is Wash Trading?
Wash Trading is a very common form of market manipulation which is carried out when a person, or even an exchange, fabricates trades by being on the two ends of a trade. One party buys an asset on one end and then sells it to himself on the other end to fabricate trades so as to give the market or a particular asset, an outlook of great performance.
For example, an investor or stakeholder could sell a particular amount of ETH at one price and then goes to buy it back on the end at the same price. When this is done, the party involved bears little or no loss but has succeeded in increasing the trading volume either of that particular coin or of the exchange where the wash trading was done.
Wash Trading in the Market
Wash trading in the crypto market is so rampant now that for some coins, it accounts for more than 90% of their entire trading volume. The Bitcoin trading volume available on the top 40 cryptocurrency exchanges, according to the BTI, Is 65% wash traded.
The institute also says that HitBTC, Bibox, Huobi, and OKEx are responsible for most of this fabrication. Additionally, BTI says that all the exchanges report a combined $50billion trading volume every day. However, when the wash traded volume has been subtracted, a whopping $45 billion is gone, leaving the actual figure to a maximum of $5 billion daily.
