More than half of Bitcoin transactions carried out on centralized platforms do not make economic sense and are fictitious. This was stated in a recently published study by Forbes analysts.

The experts of the publication examined the trading activities of 157 cryptocurrency exchanges. They used licensing information from regulators, statistics from services like Messari and CoinGecko, network traffic data from SimilarWeb, and dozens of interviews with CEOs of large companies to evaluate performance.

Analysts concluded that as of June 14, 2022, the daily global trading volume for bitcoin pairs was $128 billion, which is 51% less than the $262 billion that could be obtained by summing up the values ​​reported by the platforms themselves.

According to the results of the study, the publication divided the cryptocurrency exchanges into three groups, depending on the deviation of the transmitted indicators from the real ones:

• 0-25% – 48 platforms with a total trading volume of $39 billion on June 14;
• 26-79% – 73 exchanges that earned $81 billion (versus $158 billion announced);
• 80-99% – The remaining 36 sites generating $7.7 billion (versus $59 billion advertised).

Analysts noted that the latter group predominantly includes emerging companies that do not have reliable tools to monitor the use of fictitious trading practices (wash trading). The backbone of the third group is the “unregulated and small” cryptocurrency exchanges.

Recall that in March 2022, the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission ordered Coinbase to pay $6.5 million in fines for falsifying trading activity data.

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