New Report Says Bitcoin’s Daily Trading Volume Is Fake, So What’s The Real Number?

Bitcoin trading volumes have always exceeded expectations in the past. Last week, celebrations filled the community as the digital asset had reportedly seen more than $1 trillion in transactions on the network so far. However, a new report claims that trading volumes reported by exchanges may be inflated. The headline number, they predict, will be much lower than what is being reported, especially on a daily basis.

Reported fake Bitcoin volume

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 157 crypto exchanges and found that the numbers from self-reported sources had greatly increased the volume of bitcoin transacted.

These exchanges usually report bitcoin daily volume according to their internal processes, which end 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 deviation is also seen on other analysis platforms. Currently, This is reported by Glassnode that the total net flow of bitcoin 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 is the real number?

Forbes delved deeper into the reported daily trading volume for bitcoin and suggests that the majority of the reported volume is fake, at 51%. It also gave its own predicted volume, saying: “We estimate global industry daily bitcoin volume to be $128 billion as of June 14. That’s % less than the $262 billion that would be obtained by summing self-reported volume from multiple sources .”

The discrepancies between sites like CoinMarketCap and CoinGecko also continue. At the time of writing, CoinMarketCap reports that the total daily trading volume of BTC is just over $28 billion. A look at CoinGecko shows that the 24-hour trading volume is $25.17 billion, roughly a difference of $3 billion.

The same is the case with the price of bitcoin across different websites. 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 accurate way to know the daily bitcoin volume despite the reputation of the firms.

Featured image from Business Today, chart from TradingView.com

follow Best Owie on Twitter for market insights, updates and the occasional funny tweet…