Trustworthy Crypto Information

For quite some time I have been monitoring the wash trading situation in crypto.

For those of you who may not be aware, wash trading is rampant in the crypto world. Unscrupulous exchanges do everything in their power to look a lot busier than what they are, ultimately hoping to make more money for themselves in the process. This isn’t a lesson about wash trading, if you want to know more about that then I’m sure you know where to find Google.

Today I want to tell you about CoinGecko. A meant to do this a week ago when it (I’ll tell you what “it” is in a moment) was launched, but I was sitting with personal issues which prevented me from blogging last week, so I apologise that I wasn’t able to share this information sooner. Hang on, what am I apologising for? I give you so much awesome crypto information gratis, I retract my apology!

What CoinGecko have done is to introduce something which they are calling a “Trust Score”. You can find all the gory details at https://blog.coingecko.com/trust-score/. In their own words:

“Trust Score” is a blended formula that takes into account exchanges’ reported trading volume, web traffic, and order book depth.

They use a service called SimilarWeb to aggregate exchange data based on web traffic (which is much harder to fake than trade data) from multiple sources. They then compare this to aggregate data based on trusted exchanges and derive a score.

I think this is a great idea and I welcome it. It will go a long way towards making the identities of the unethical exchanges more transparent. I don’t know about you, but personally I would love to see the unethical charlatans identified and removed from the world of crypto, as far as I am concerned they have no place here (they can rather go work for a bank somewhere!).

CoinGecko is a major crypto data website, so hopefully this will create a lot more awareness of the wash trading problem and will help to keep exchanges honest. By their own admission, the system is far from perfect, but they are asking for feedback on it, which may help to refine their algorithms. My biggest problem with CoinGecko is that they don’t grant users of their site permission to reproduce the contents of their site. That is why you only ever see CoinMarketCap coin data in my blogs. I have asked CoinGecko to change their policies, pointing out to them that they are shooting themselves in the foot, hopefully they listen.

Unfortunately the “score” part of their trust score is not readily apparent. They do flag the worst exchanges and they provide reported vs normalised trade data (which CoinMarketCap can also do). I would like each exchange to have a very visible score – perhaps something on a 0-100 scale. At the moment all they have is a coloured dot – better than nothing I suppose, but not as good as a number. I suggest that you take a look for yourself and send them any suggestions to help them out.

CoinGecko is not the only crypto website actively working to highlight the wash trading issue. Other sites like OPENMARKETCAP and Blockchain Transparency Institute are also doing their part to combat the problem. Hats off to them all, they are helping crypto to become much better and stronger!

CoinGecko already have a list of other improvements that they are going to work into their “Trust Score”, I look forward to seeing how those work out. It’s also worth mentioning that they now include “2% data” for each trading pair (click on a coin to see). This data tells you how much money needs to be spent on a buy or a sell to move the price of any trading pair up or down by 2%. It’s a little tricky to explain without being able to show you a screenshot, so either read their full explanation or go take a look at the coin pages yourself.

Conclusion

For crypto to grow it must be safe and credible. Wash trading hurts us all and has a negative impact on the legitimacy of our sector. Let us all make use of these anti-wash trading tools and help to promote them. There are some dodgy exchanges out there, let’s rather promote the good ones (see my signature) so that the media doesn’t show the public things like this:

Yours in crypto

Bit Brain

@coingecko

“The secret to success: find out where people are going and get there first”
~ Mark Twain

“Crypto does not require institutional investment to succeed; institutions require crypto investments to remain successful”
~ Bit Brain

Trustworthy Crypto Information