Do Coin Market Cap & Data Providers Need to be Decentralized? Jonathan Ganor 2019-09-19 04:31:12 554 views

Can A Data Provider's Glitch Manipulate the Markets?

CoinMarketCap has long been favored by cryptocurrency enthusiasts and traders. The cryptocurrency price and data provider has been around since 2013, the early days of Bitcoin. It quickly grew hand in hand with public interest in Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. As per Similarweb it is now the world's #9 financial news provider.

Its popularity and lack of competition are worrying, however. Since so many individuals rely on CoinMarketCap, it has the ability to display incorrect information which can confuse traders at best.

Tether Glitch on CoinMarketCap

As previously uncovered by our team, CoinMarketCap has displayed incorrect information regarding Tether. The circulating supply displayed was 13 M higher than the total supply. This is something that has appeared purely illogical and bizarre.

We have reached out to CoinMarketCap on Twitter and received a response.





While this appears to have resolved the temporary glitch, it does raise a question or two: Is CoinMarketCap too centralized for the decentralized cryptocurrency community? Are we too reliant on their services and what if they hypothetically choose to manipulate the markets?

ADX on CoinMarketCap

We have received another complaint from Ivo Georgiev, CEO of AdEx (ADX). He claims that CoinMarketCap are displaying the wrong information on their website. Despite several attempts to contact CoinMarketCap's team to correct the information, nothing was done.





"Our circulating supply on CMC is wrong. The total supply of ADX as defined by the token contract is 100M All of the tokens are unlocked and over 80m of them are released to the public Yet, CMC shows 73M.

They claim their calculation is automatic, but it is definitely not so since it hasn't change for over a year. During which time, all tokens have been unlocked. We've previously given them APIs, detailed information, etc.

The final straw was our last email exchange with them, where they asked us for more information about our mainnet. We have no mainnet, and we've never said we will; it's total BS that came out of nowhere."

CoinMarketCap has responded and promised to fix the inaccuracy, but so far, no action can be seen.

Hi, thank you for bringing this to our attention! Our team has corrected the info. — CoinMarketCap (@CoinMarketCap) September 18, 2019

One can only assume that some more similar complaints exist.





We will continuously update this story. Stay tuned for more information.





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