More Than Half Of All Bitcoin Trades Are Fake

Unfortunately for the bitcoin ETF hopefuls, many of these fears and criticisms are valid. As part of Forbes research into the crypto ecosystem using 2021 data, we ranked the 60 best exchanges in March. More recently we conducted a deeper-dive into the bitcoin trading markets to answer a few pressing questions:

1. Where is bitcoin traded?
2. How much bitcoin gets traded every day?
3. How is bitcoin traded?

Our study evaluated 157 crypto exchanges across the world. Here are our main findings:

1. More than half of all reported trading volume is likely to be fake or non-economic. Forbes estimates the global daily bitcoin volume for the industry was $128 billion on June 14. That is 51% less than the $262 billion one would get by taking the sum of self-reported volume from multiple sources.
2. Tether, the world’s largest stablecoin, continues to be a dominant player in the crypto trading economy, especially when it comes to trades against bitcoin. Its current market capitalization is $68 billion, despite questions about its reserves.
3. In terms of how much bitcoin activity takes place at these firms, 21 crypto exchanges generate $1 billion or more in daily trading activity, while the next 33 exchanges had volume between $200 million and $999 million across all contract types, spot, futures and perpetuals. Perpetual futures, or perpetual swaps as they are also known, are futures contracts that don’t require investors to roll over their positions. Binance is the clear leader, with a 27% market share, followed by FTX. Looking only at spot bitcoin, the top position is shared by Binance, FTX, and OKX. Chicago-based CME Group is the market leader in bitcoin futures trading.
4. The biggest problem areas regarding fake volume are firms that tout big volume but operate with little or no regulatory oversight that would make their figures more credible, notably Binance, MEXC Global and Bybit. Altogether, the lesser regulated exchanges in our study account for approximately $89 billion of the true volume (they claim $217 billion).
5. The creation of new trading assets and products such as stablecoins and perpetual futures adds complications for national authorities seeking to regulate crypto markets. Major U.S. exchanges hardly utilize these instruments or contracts in any of their trading. However, offshore exchanges make significant use of them as ways to synthetically create U.S. dollar liquidity on their platforms (they cannot get U.S. bank accounts).
6. In the Western world and particularly in the U.S., it is tempting to think of bitcoin only trading against either the U.S. dollar or the euro and British pound. But some of the largest trading pair activity occurs against fiat currencies like the Japanese yen and Korean won and against major stablecoins like Binance U.S. dollar and the USD coin.
7. 573 million people visit crypto exchange websites on a monthly basis.

We hope that this report builds on top of the important work done by other digital asset researchers such as Bitwise, which estimated in a March 2019 white paper that 95% of CoinMarketCap’s bitcoin trading volume was fake and/or non-economic.