The site responded to these concerns in a recent blog post, and it also announced that it was also revising its requirements for cryptocurrency exchange listings. Coinmarketcap removed the volume feature as the main condition for listing “due to the recent changes in the exchange landscape, and the concerns aired by our community.” This implementation will be applied to start on Monday.
“The removal of the limit is partly to combat the impression that volume is the only requirement that is necessary for listing on CoinMarketCap,” the site posted in its official blog.
“In fact, our team spends time researching new coins and exchanges to ensure that they are real projects, backed by real teams, and are not fraudulent, before putting them on CoinMarketCap.”
Also, the site will be adding additional filters and will gradually change its ranking system. CoinMarketCap will also feature more levers and toggles for the filtering of exchanges according to how users consider them relevant.
New metrics will also be added, such as 7-day and 30-day volume, along with the founding date of each exchange, so that users can have a way of assessing how steady an exchange’s volume is.
“In this way, by introducing different ways to look at exchanges and their respective features, the ranking system will be able to take into account various expectations that users have and help them view and digest exchange information better,” CoinMarketCap said.
In the past few months, several brand new cryptocurrency exchanges climbed up quickly through CoinMarketCap’s rankings. As an example, Coinsuper, went from 16th to the Top 5 in just a month, temporarily dethroning established exchange such as Binance that was usually topped among those ranks.
Another notable example would be Fcoin, which does not have any kind of prevalence in the crypto world, and yet it is still ahead of OKEx, Binance, and Bithumb.
These bizarre rankings and volumes led many members of the crypto community to suspect that fake volumes and manipulations were to blame. This prompted the authors of the CryptoExchangeRank blog to do some additional research concerning the curious case of BitForex, FCoin, and CoinEx and ultimately concluding that BitForex was driving its volumes through wash trade.
Time will tell if the new CoinMarketCap implementations and algorithms will stop this kind of manipulations.