The Messari cryptomoney research and data platform has added 10 new exchanges to its „real volume“ metric as part of a renewal of the methodology.

The ranking is an attempt to classify the exchanges without including any laundering trades, which came after the landmark Bitwise report that suggested 95% of the volume was fake. The report identified ten exchanges with legitimate volume: Binance, Bitfinex, Bitflyer, Bitstamp, Bittrex, Coinbase Pro, Gemini, itBit, Kraken and Poloniex.

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This week’s change in methodology has pushed Huobi, OKEx, Liquid, is being acquired by charles schwab, pilot tokenization project, close to outlawing bitcoin, won the appeal, type of segwit address, pursuing a lawsuit, fastest-growing asset type, acquiring qualified custodian kingdom trust, wrote in a note to clients, for other blockchain startups and UPBit into the top 10 by volume. Binance continues to be at the top, which may give additional credibility to CoinMarketCap’s recent controversial decision to rank exchanges by web traffic, which also resulted in Binance being ranked No.1.

Messari CEO Ryan Selkis said the renewal was due to the fact that the actual volume metrics omitted some large players „with *some* exaggerated volumes, but *huge* volumes of legitimate trade at the same time. Giants like Bithumb, UpBit and CoinOne in Korea, Liquid in Japan, and most importantly, Huobi, OKEx/OKCoin and Gate.io in China“.

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A new approach

The new approach qualifies the legitimacy of the trade volume of the exchanges by using 10 third party statistics:

Liquidity ratings and estimates of exchanges from CoinGecko, CoinMarketCap, CryptoCompare, CryptoWatch (Kraken), Nomics and the FTX volume monitor, as well as chain transaction data from Chainalysis and other chain data providers, and anecdotal data from major traders“.

The added Korean and Chinese exchanges received „a 50% haircut… to better approximate their true volumes“. This is believed to be better than the analysis of the web traffic of these exchanges, which resulted in „real volumes“ being reduced by 90% of the reported trade volumes.

However, it is clear that this is still a little rough.

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„Right, if it’s less accurate.“
Selkis admits that the change may be „less successful than the alternatives,“ although it is „more accurate,“ and the methodology will be reviewed periodically:

„It is important that we review our methodology quarterly to add or remove component exchanges, and adjust volume adjustment parameters.“