CRYPTO MOVERS:

Bitcoin  U$8,085.00;  +0.95% | XRP  U$0.4009; +0.21%
Ethereum  U$257.15; +3.11% | EOS  U$6.4680; +1.25%
Litecoin  U$134.05; -3.82% | Bitcoin SV  U$207.84; +10.13%

Two Sentence Summary: Crypto is higher this morning with Litecoin (LTC) now the only coin in the Top 10 that is negative. Bitcoin SV (BSV) is best performing and the only member of the Top 10 up over +10%.

Crypto Story of the Day:

More Services Are Launching Which Attempt To Rank Crypto Exchanges By 'Real Volume' And Operational Integrity - The Providers Frequently Disagree With Each Other And There Remains A Degree Of Subjectivity In The Metrics

• The trend towards sources which attempt to decipher 'real' trading activity and exchange integrity accelerated in March following Bitwise's now famous, 'Presentation To The SEC' about falsified volumes on crypto exchanges. The report suggested that the primary repository within the ecosystem for exchange data Coinmarketcap (CMC) was an unreliable source and blindly reported wash trades and even outright fraudulent data. Since then websites like The Blockchain Transparency Institute (BTI) have rebranded and new sites like CryptoCompare have emerged in a presumed attempt to take CMC market share. Other sites such as Messari have attempted to develop differentiated pricing data, another long-held CMC complaint.

Takeaway: 

There is little debate that wash trading and capturing true volume statistics remains a massive issue in crypto. The Bitwise report eloquently summarized the problem and broadly distributed it to the point that CMC had to publicly question their own data. While it's positive that these new data-tools are emerging, there is little uniformity among statistics / rankings. For example, while BTI presents UpBit as the second most active exchange, the platform does not feature anywhere in the Top 10 for CryptoCompare. Furthermore, CryptoCompare uses several subjective metrics such as 'Team' and 'Geography' in establishing their quality rankings. BTI, for their part, gives almost no detail for what they qualify as 'wash trading' within their true-volume assessment. Ultimately, while the trend to establish more reliable data in crypto is positive, only marginal progress has been made since the Bitwise report.