Binance Dominates Cryptocurrency Platform Rankings, As Exchanges in Korea Surge

Cryptocurrency exchanges are becoming critical elements to the entire crypto ecosystem as they are the initial point of entry for a majority of the users and investors in digital assets. As such cryptocurrency exchanges are big business and the boom of Bitcoin has made them fiercely competitive.

The Blockchain Transparency Institute recently took to rank the cryptocurrency platforms and surprisingly Binance turned out to be top with a trading volume of $1 billion within 24 hours. In comparison, OKEx, once ranked first, came in second with a daily trading volume of $700 million from a mere 30,000 users. The report further indicated Binance also surpassed OKEx regarding active users, web visitors, mobile volume and its API volume. Binance leads with over 160 web users, and 152,000 mobile users.

The findings by the Blockchain Transparency Institute team also took to task the new methods employed by upcoming exchanges looking to ride on the popularity with initial coin offerings (ICOs). The past two years saw a rise in exchanges with opaque listing fees, and suspicious high volumes of little-known tokens, giving rise to controversial debates.

According to the research team, the new malpractices by upcoming exchanges involve targeting low market cap cryptos with irresistible offers to build up their volume and trade activity. In return, the coin would get increased hype and luckily get listed on crypto data platforms such as CoinMarketCap.

The team explains the logic of the malpractice by saying:

“We found many of these exchanges were preying on low market cap coins which are desperate for the recognition and volume of a top 10 or 25 exchange. In most of the crypto projects we spoke with, this also involves supplying the exchange with a large number of tokens which are then used to inflate volume numbers on CMC massively, eventually luring in prospective traders from other exchanges with much lower, but real volume.”

However, the Blockchain Transparency Institute also found out a mechanism put in place by leading exchanges like Binance and Korean-based Gopax to legitimize the crypto market. The exchange is leveraging their volume by requesting high listing fees of between 5BTC to 60BTC, to counter the efforts of malpractices.

The research reads:

“The initial report on exchange volumes revealed many top 100 exchanges on CoinMarketCap using wash trading to gain a marketing advantage over their competitors. We did find many of these exchanges gaining 80-90% of their referral web traffic from CMC alone.”

Despite the rise in malpractices among exchanges, there are still positive reviews of exchanges solidifying their position as reliable trading platforms. South Korean crypto platforms, Bithum and Upbit, did see a rise in value significant enough to see them enter into the top 10 trading platform ranking. A good cause for this would be the recent approval of the Korean Financial Service Commission to allow banking services to work with crypto exchanges. Such a move could result in a definite rise in trading activity among the exchanges.

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