CoinMarketCap Removes Volume Requirements for Cryptocurrency Exchange Listing
Cryptocurrency data aggregation site CoinMarketCap has removed volume requirements for exchanges listed on its platform, citing concerns over data transparency and clarity.
The platform, the 276th-most popular website according to Alexa, made this announcement in a blog post, responding to a barrage of criticism that exchanges have been gaming its statistical algorithms to get listed more easily and rank higher once they do, providing them with more visibility and prestige.
Users have long complained that exchanges inflate their volumes using low-fee models, which encourage traders to increase their activity, either manually or with bots, to receive lower per-trade fees.
Similarly, many exchanges have been accused of using questionable methods to increase their volume, whether through exchange-operated market making services or straight-up wash trading.
The latest volume-enhancing scheme is so-called “transaction mining,” which has cropped up in popularity among many trading platforms that now rank toward the top of CMC’s daily volume charts. In this model, exchanges technically charge transaction fees but indirectly refund them by issuing their own cryptocurrency tokens to traders.
Rather than censor such exchanges, though, CoinMarketCap said that it will instead attempt to “over-provide” on data and tools to analyze it, giving individuals the ability to reach informed conclusions on their own.
“Even though we try our best to verify the data with the exchanges on our site, we are not in the practice of censoring or policing others. In an open ecosystem like the one we are in, we believe that the best policy – that we follow closely – is to over-provide on data and let users make their own informed choices about what to do with that data.”
Some of these new tools include the ability to view exchange volume over a longer time horizon than the 24-hour rankings currently available, as well a filtering tool that helps users distinguish between exchanges that operate on different fee models.
“Again, we want to state that our philosophy is to provide as much information as possible to our users, so that they can form their own conclusions and interpretations – and not introduce our own bias into that mix,” the company concluded, adding that “ it is an extremely demanding problem that requires all our stakeholders in the cryptocurrency community to solve.”