The Biggest Crypto Market Website Admits It Provides Inaccurate Data

The biggest aggregator of cryptocurrency market data, CoinMarketCap.com aims to improve its services further as it admitted that data on its website is not accurate.

The company told Bloomberg that concerns over exchanges’ trading volumes inaccuracies “are valid”.

Now, in addition to the measures taken last year, CoinMarketCap.com plans to include liquidity measures, hot and cold wallet balances and traffic data for listed exchanges, the report said, citing Carylyne Chan, global head of marketing at the site. According to her, the website wants to provide as much information as possible, so their users can draw their own conclusions without the need for the website to “make arbitrary judgment calls on what is ’good’ or ’bad’”.

Meanwhile, last year, the website removed volume requirements for exchanges to be listed, introduced 7-day and 30-day volume, and started listing establishment dates for exchanges. At the time of writing, there are 236 exchanges listed on CoinMarketCap.com.

Last week, crypto investment company Bitwise Asset Management said that the CoinMarketCap.com data includes a large amount of fake and/or non-economic trading volume, thereby giving a fundamentally mistaken impression of the true size and nature of the bitcoin market.

Bitwise claimed that approximately 95% of this volume is fake and/or non-economic in nature, and that the real market for bitcoin is significantly smaller. Just 10 of the 81 top exchanges are revealed to have actual volume, according to firm. However, it excluded Korean exchanges from the analysis and admitted that not all fake exchanges are easy to spot.

As reported in February, a research from investment firm CoVenture, backed by Japanese financial giant SBI Holdings, identified two strategies anyone can use to expose exchanges that engage in wash trading, or inflating trading volumes by simultaneously buying and selling crypto assets.

Meanwhile, CoinMarketCap.com registered almost 56 million visits in February, or 15% less than in January and 36% less than in September 2018, according to digital market intelligence platform Similarweb.

Some of its closest competitors include Coingecko.com (7.7 million visits in February) and Cryptocompare.com (4.5 million visits), while new players such as Coinpaprika.com (1.2 million visits), Messari.io (359,000 visits), Coincodex.com (760,900 visits) and others are also trying to increase their share in the market.