Digibyte will reportedly be delisted from the Poloniex exchange following a Twitter dispute with its founder Jared Tate.

We don’t own any US customers’ data as all of them are preserved by Circle. BTW, after careful review, we decided #DigiByte is not qualified for our listing standard. We will delist $DGB soon. Details to be announced. — Poloniex Exchange (@Poloniex) December 5, 2019

During a recent exchange on Twitter, Tate expressed frustrations with the Poloniex exchange and its perceived favoritism for Tron due in part to its announcement of free listings for Tron-based assets. In response, the exchange’s Twitter account indicated that the platform would be delisting DigiByte from the platform, allegedly because it “is not qualified for our listing standard”.

Poloniex is a top cryptocurrency exchange, considered by the Blockchain Transparency Institute (BTI) as a verified “clean” exchange with real trading volume rather than faked wash trading. It currently ranks 14th on BTI’s top list of verified exchanges by real volume.

Accusations over Poloniex conflict of interest

In the debate that led to the DigiByte delisting announcement, Tate harshly criticized Tron as a project with little practical and technical merit with an oversized influence due to price manupulation practices:

“Nothing about Tron is unique other than a few gambling apps and the marketing hype and paid Twitter bots. They even copied most of the white paper. With a 100% premine you can afford to pay reporters, listing fees & market makers to wash trade for you.”

1/8 Im disgusted by all these #TRON trolls/bots attacking me & hyping a 100% premined & completely centralized network like its the most decentralized gift from god. Now #Poloniex has turned into a $TRX shill factory after making off w/ US customers sensitive data. Fact time: — Jared Tate (@jaredctate) December 4, 2019

Tate then went to criticize the Poloniex exchange itself for allegedly acting in conflict of interest due to its ownership:

“After writing Blockchain2035, Tron was the most blatant con job we saw after diving into hundreds of projects and blockchain protocols. And then Circle App sold Poloniex to [Tron founder Justin] Sun. I am royally pissed my personal data, my friends and families data and other US DigiByte customers most sensitive data is now in the hands of this circus that is now Poloniex. Or the Tron shill factory as we should now call it.”

The struggle between real value and speculation-based projects

The DigiByte delisting underscores the divide in the cryptocurrency sector between speculation and real use, a struggle Dash has faced repeatedly. VeChain’s founder famously claimed cryptocurrency is 99% speculation-based, with Ripple’s CEO claiming that most cryptocurrencies will go to zero valuation. Analysis by the US Drug Enforcement Administration also claims that most Bitcoin transactions are speculative. Dash shows high growth in adoption-focused metrics including active addresses, transaction value data most in line with regular payments rather than speculative transfers, and transaction counts growing 178% annually while outpacing competitors. Despite this, Dash’s market performance has lagged much of the sector, with valuation per unit falling from over $1,600 in December of 2017 to about $50 at time of writing about two years later.