The Blockchain Transparency Institute (BTI) suffered a DDoS attack after it recently posted a report on what exchanges are most engaged in wash trading.
In its May and September 2019 reports, the BTI has been working to expose those crypto exchanges that have facilitated wash trading. In their September report they noticed that since they published their findings, the overall volume of wash trading declined by 35% between the top 40 major crypto exchanges.
The top crypto exchanges that have been in the green in BTI’s reports are Kraken, Coinbase, and Poloniex, with almost no wash trade activity recorded. On the other side of the spectrum, are OKEx, Bibox, and Bithumb, which have been noticed to use wash trading to artificially increase most of their trade volume.
In another report sent by Bitwise to the SEC, it was shown that the daily volume of Bitcoin was only $272 million per day, meaning that almost all of the 95% reported daily trade volume was artificially enhanced by activities such as wash trading.
Wash trading is technically not illegal, but it is frowned upon nonetheless as it is a form of market manipulation. Wash trading involves an investor simultaneously selling and buying the same crypto/ asset in order to generate misleading, artificial activity in the marketplace.
In response to the Bitwise report, Huobi—one of the worst wash trading crypto exchanges—posted the following message:
“We did identify a few of our market makers conducting what we suspect may have been wash trading for the sake of performance and marketing purposes. We have already communicated with these market makers and they have discontinued the strategies in question.”
After these reports, many of the leading crypto exchanges started implementing measures against wash trading practices, such as updating their terms of use.
But according to BTI, one exchange decided to deny all accusations of wash trading. The OKEx CEO even challenged BTI on Twitter to a 100 BTC bet in which if OKEx proved that more than 10% of its volume is real, the exchange wins the bet.
So @BTI___ claimed 90% of our volume is fake. I dare you 100 BTC that you are wrong. If we can prove 10%+ of our volume is real, you give me 100 BTC. If we can’t, I give you 100 BTC. What say you @BTI___? If you dare not to accept challenge, please apologize for the allegation. pic.twitter.com/J3On9Lirhj
— Jay Hao (@JayHao8) September 24, 2019
BTI then remarked in a Twitter post that since OKEx’s response, the BTI website was under a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. The BTI website still cannot be reached, meaning that the attack is still ongoing.
OKEx claims that the wash trading allegations made in a recent report are based on questionable data collection methods https://t.co/QW441beJ18
— Cointelegraph (@Cointelegraph) September 23, 2019
OKEx Korea recently delisted all of its privacy coins in order to comply with FATF regulations.
Featured image: Twitter
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