Bitcoin trading volumes have always surpassed expectations in the past. Last week, celebrations filled the community as the digital asset had reportedly seen more than $1 trillion transacted on the network so far. However, a new report claims that the trading volumes reported by exchanges may be inflated. The main number, they predict, to be much lower than what is being reported, especially on a daily basis.
Reported Bitcoin Volume Fake
A new analysis report from Forbes has come back with the conclusion that more than half of bitcoin’s daily reported volumes are fake. The report focuses on the reported volumes from across 157 crypto exchanges and found that the numbers from self-reported sources had greatly inflated the volume of bitcoin being transacted.
These exchanges usually report bitcoin daily volume according to their internal processes, which ends up being different across exchanges. An example given in the report was between CoinMarketCap and CoinGecko. While the latter had reported a BTC daily volume of $32 billion, the latter had reported $27 billion in trading volume for the same time period. Others, such as Nomics, had put the volume at $57 billion, and Messari had reported a volume of $5 billion.
BTC recovers above $20,000 | Source: BTCUSD on TradingView.com
This discrepancy is also seen across other analytics platforms. As of today, Glassnode reports that the total bitcoin net flows for last week was $7.8 billion. Taking a look at data from IntoTheBlock shows that the bitcoin trading volume for the last seven days is $6.71 billion.
What’s The Real Number?
Forbes delved deeper into the reported bitcoin daily trading volume and puts forward that majority of the reported volume is fake, at 51%. It also gave its own predicted volume saying, “We estimate the global daily bitcoin volume for the industry was $128 billion on June 14. That is% less than the $262 billion one would get by taking the sum of self-reported volume from multiple sources.”
The discrepancies between sites such as CoinMarketCap and CoinGecko also continue. As of the time of this writing, CoinMarketCap reports that the total daily trading volume of BTC is a little over $28 billion. A look at CoinGecko shows that the 24-hour trading volume is $25.17 billion, about a $3 billion difference.
The same is the case with the price of bitcoin across various sites. For CoinMarketCap, BTC’s price is reported at $19,909, while CoinGecko shows a lower price of $19,852. In the end, Forbes concludes that there really is no exact way to know the daily bitcoin volume despite the reputation of the firms.
Featured image from Business Today, chart from TradingView.com
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