CoinGecks Ups the Ante for Transparency Among Crypto Exchanges

The issue of transparency in cryptocurrency exchanges reporting trading volumes has been a topic of contention for months. This is why CoinGecko, a cryptocurrency market aggregator, decided to implement upgrades to its Trust Score metric to help provide additional clarity on this.

Speaking on stage at the Invest: Asia event organized by CoinDesk, CoinGecko co-founder Bobby Ong revealed that they have been able to increase the number of exchanges that they will monitor. In the past 18 months, they’ve seen a 706 percent growth, going from 45 exchanges to 363. 

The Trust Score system itself was first released in May, when the market aggregator claimed that it would be using this to help reduce the instance of crypto exchanges reporting fake trading volumes. According to Ong, the new scoring system (which has been dubbed Trust Score 2.0), will consider certain indexes; an exchanges API technical coverage, regulatory compliance, estimated crypto reserves, and the scale of the exchange’s operations.

CoinGecko shed additional light on its ranking system in a blog post published this week. According to the post, the company bases about 50 percent of its Trust Score 2.0 on the liquidity of the exchanges. Thirty percent is allotted to the scale of operations, while the remaining 20 percent accounts for technical coverage. 

“Cryptocurrency Reserves and Regulatory Compliance categories are not included in the overall Trust Score 2.0 calculations for now but are considered candidates for inclusion in future Trust Score algorithm updates,” the company said in the post.

In a statement, T.M. Lee, another CoinGecko co-founder, said, “With the launch of Trust Score 2.0, progress is being made to promote transparency amongst cryptocurrency exchanges. We look forward to innovating further to better evaluate cryptocurrency exchanges based on a comprehensive set of data.”

The new scoring system has already taken full effect, and the exchange identified Binance, Bitfinex, Bittrex, Poloniex, and Coinbase Pro as the top five transparent cryptocurrency exchanges. 

With the new scoring system now live, CoinGecko has identified the top five crypto exchanges, according to its metrics. They are Binance, Bitfinex, Bittrex, Poloniex, and Coinbase Pro.

The issue of false reporting was first raised by Bitwise Asset Management back in May, when it released a report which, amongst other things, claimed that the crypto market has been largely inconsistent with data reporting. The asset management company focused especially on exchanges, pointing out that up to 95 percent of them report fake trading volumes.

Many within the industry have weighed in since then, and the Trust Score 2.0 is just the latest move by crypto insiders to help provide additional transparency to the way exchanges report Bitcoin trading and crypto volumes. 

A few weeks back, Nomics, a tech-focused data, and analytics firm, announced a new Transparency Volume service, which it believes will help reduce the risk of exchanges manipulating trading volumes. In an announcement, the firm explained that its new product would monitor asset movements across crypto exchanges in real-time, thus ensuring that volumes reported are unadulterated, and analysts can get a holistic view of exchange’s performances.

The firm pointed out a need for the crypto market to have a pure data source, as opposed to tools which provide low-latency access. It added, “This data can be used to provide incredible clarity and confidence when it’s available to all, at scale, and analyzed by open-source methodologies that can be criticized by the public.”

The company further promised to aggregate data from al crypto exchanges, thus ushering in a trustless, decentralized form of market transparency.