Forbes reported on 19 December 2018 that CER (Crypto Exchange Ranks) accused Bithumb, a South Korean based crypto exchange of faking up to 94% of its trading volume. When asked for a response by Forbes, Bithumb denied the allegations, saying that the platform does not sell mining-based coin, but rather offer various promotions to attract customers.

CER is a cryptocurrency rankings and analytics service provided by Hacken Ecosystem. After analyzing and observing data obtained from CoinMarketCap, a page that provides data of several types of digital coins such as their prices and trade volumes, CER reached a conclusion that there were several suspicious activities on Bithumb’s platform since September.

In that month, Bithumb ranked the last in the top ten global exchange list with approximately $350 million daily trade volume. However, in the short duration of around two months, the platform managed to achieve a daily trade volume of $4.4 billion on 11 November 2018. Currently, Bithumb is placed second in the list with a trade volume of $1.56 billion.

CER marketing lead, Gleb Myrko, told Forbes that Bithumb achieved the enarly impossible feat by ‘wash trading’, a method where the market is manipulated by buying and selling the same financial instruments to create false and misleading activities. Myrko also confirmed that price fluctuation had no influence of Bithumb’s trade volume performance.

CER also commented that the overall trading patterns of the crypto exchange were irregular and did not make much sense. For example, several cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin (BTC), Bitcoin Gold (BTG), Ethereum Classic (ETC), Litecoin (LTC), Monero (XMR), Omisego (OMG) and Zcash (ZEC) had massive activity spikes in the first few minutes of the 11 a.m. hour. The fact that these activities contributed 95% of the daily trade volume was very strange and did not allign with price moves.

Additionally, the average BTC transaction size on the exchange experienced an extraordinary increase from 0.21 BTC to 5.88 BTC in the duration of only a few months. Waltonchain (WTC) also experienced extreme fluctuations in its daily volume, having a 350% increase from 28 October 2018 to 11 November 2018, then a 1450% decrease on 12 November 2018.

Hopefully, Bithumb will be able to prove its innocence by giving data evidence of what exactly happened in this period of time that led to the phenomena in its exchange platform which were unexplainable unless ‘certain measures’ were utilized and exploited.