Several high profile tokens have taken a deep plunge in value during this year’s crypto bear market, causing investors to lose money and exposing many projects for their true value. During this time, many exchanges have taken it upon themselves to weed out the weakest tokens on their platform.

As cited in a previous article, exchanges like OKEX, Poloniex and Kucoin have begun delisting tokens for a variety of reasons ranging from security issues to poor communication from the team.

However, a recent tweet by Unikoin CEO Rahul Sood exposes another side of the token purge process that casts a negative light on the exchanges.

Rahul expressed his disappointment in the fact that both OKEX and Kucoin were demanding that his team should increase the trading volume of their token “by any means necessary” or get delisted.

Both exchanges were presumably noticed low trading volume from Unikoins token ‘UGK’, which may have been affecting their bottom line. The fact that they were willing to accept tokens increasing trading volume by any means necessary (which usually implies engaging in wash trading, where companies buy and sell their tokens repeatedly to increase trading volume) exposes how little these exchanges are concerned with being regulatory friendly or creating an honest and transparent trading environment for users.

Rahul also tagged Silvio Schembri (Jr. Minister for Financial Services in the Office of the Prime Minister – Malta) and Joseph Muscat (Prime Minister of Malta), presumably because both Kucoin and OKEX have opened offices in Malta in the past few months. Rahul stated that Silvio and Joseph should be more selective when considering exchanges to welcome into their country.

This act of wash trading or creating fake trading volume through any means is highly illegal and would instantly be penalized by the SEC if it were to occur in the stock market. For this reason, Rahul lamented about how incidents like are the primary reason why the SEC will not approve a Bitcoin ETF.

Ultimately, the fact that this incident was exposed is positive because it at least shows that there are projects willing to remain honest and do the right thing even if it means possibly getting delisted from major exchanges like OKEX or Kucoin. Only time will tell if this incident has any effect on both exchanges, however, for now, it should make traders skeptical about the claims OKEX and Kucoin make that they are trying to “create a robust trading environment and offer the best trading experience to our users”.

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