Today, an exchange Bitforex is under fire for faking trade volumes. An investigation by cryptoexchangerates have revealed that the exchange was faking volumes on huge scales and have accused CoinMarketCap (CMC) to be complicit to it. The exchange jumped from a ranking of 100 to within top 10 exchanges by volume recently, which prompted the investigation.

Back on the home turf, it seems Bitbns is pulling off a similar game but on a much lower level. In the early hours of Thursday, Dhiraj, a telegram user shared some data on Bitbns Trade volumes with Coin Crunch. The real volumes from the trade history did not match up to the 24 Hr volumes broadcasted by Bitbns on their website as well as coinmarketcap.

Dhiraj shared the data on Coin Crunch India’s public telegram group which Bitbns founders are also a part of. Prashant Singh, the co-founder of Bitbns replied, “We will check and fix it”. But I remember the old saying, ‘Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice shame on me’. This would be the third time, Coin Crunch India or I personally am reporting Fake volumes on Bitbns.

Is Bitbns Faking the Trade volume?

Dhiraj’s data is already 10 hours old at the time of this writing, so I pulled off some of the current data. You cannot see the 24 hour trade history of all the assets on Bitbns, but for some you can. The volumes are so low, that only a handful of trades take place within 24 hours. That becomes the best example to compare the volumes published vs the actual volumes. If the 24 hour data is unavailable, such as in case of high volume cryptocurrencies, you can total the volume in the past few minutes or hours and compare the average with the 24 hour volume.

Today, I am checking multiple cryptocurrency volumes, comparing volume with competitors and checking the website statistics to match with other competitors. Let us get started.

Inflation on Low Volume Cryptocurrencies

I took screen-grabs of several small/low volume cryptocurrencies to compare the 24 hour volume. It is not a steady inflation of volume. The inflation ranges from as low as 19% to even 3000%.

Phantasma – SOUL

The SOUL trade volume for the last 24 hours reported by Bitbns is 1824.63. However, the sum of the trades that took place in the last 24 hours between 12:20 PM yesterday and 12:20 PM today is 1071.62.

Difference in Volume: 753.01 SOUL. Inflated volume by percentage ~ 70%

Augur – REP

The REP trade volume for the last 24 hours reported by Bitbns is 3.93. However, the sum of the trades that took place in the last 24 hours between 12:24 PM yesterday and 12:24 PM today is 3.3.

Difference in Volume: 0.63 REP. Inflated volume percentage ~ 19%

Apex – CPX

The CPX trade volume for the last 24 hours reported by Bitbns is 1809.43. However, the sum of the trades that took place in the last 24 hours between 12:27 PM yesterday and 12:27 PM today is 58.4.

Difference in Volume: 1751.03 CPX. Inflated volume percentage ~ 3000%

Inflation on High Volume Cryptocurrencies

In case of high volume assets, we cannot determine the trade history of last 24 hours unless we can monitor each and every trade. Nevertheless, you can make a judgment of inflation of volume from the trade history that is available to us.

Wanchain – WAN

The WAN trade volume for the last 24 hours reported by Bitbns is 297.18. However, the sum of the trades that took place in the last 16 hours between 08:14 PM yesterday and 12:35 PM today is 25.17.

How did Bitbns complete over 270 WAN trades in the previous 8 hours if they could only do 25 in the 16 hours after that?

Verge – XVG

The XVG trade volume for the last 24 hours reported by Bitbns is 4.03 lakhs. However, the sum of the trades that took place in the last one hour between 11:34 AM and 12:34 PM today is 12590 XVG.

Keeping 12590 in mind as average trade per hour, the total volume for 24 hours should be around 3.02 lakhs. For 4.03 lakhs volume, Bitbns must have pulled 16790 XVG trades an hour and that is including the night time when trades are mostly zero.

There is no solid way to prove Bitbns volume wrong, but there seems to be some inflation here as well, considering all parameters.

Not the First Time

Bitbns has been accused of inflating volumes numerous times by their users and the community. Coin Crunch has reported the inflation once from the official handle and I reported it once myself in the past. This will be the third time.

We investigated an issue reported by a user about ETN volumes on BitBns.

We found that BitBns is incorrectly calculating the volume of trade. the trade volume is doubled in most cases. @bitbns please respond#Cryptocurrency #Trading #Volume #Exchange #Bitbns #Investigation pic.twitter.com/k50PAY8l5p

— Coin Crunch India (@coincrunchin) March 17, 2018

Umm hey @bitbns Can you check your XRP volume? Something seems off. Are you sure you pull over 500k XRP trade volume while in the last 50 min, the trade was just about 4400 XRP? pic.twitter.com/lMydPi65kd
— Naimish Sanghvi (@ThatNaimish) July 11, 2018

Comparing the Volume with Other Exchanges?

While many exchanges are shy and do not share their trade volumes, a few of them do. For the comparison we can pull the data from Coinmarketcap.

We will take into account the biggest competitors to Bitbns in India right now, Zebpay and Koinex.

Zebpay

Zebpay is leading the volume game in India with 1.7 Million USD worth of trades in the past 24 hours. The exchange has been widely known as the biggest exchange in India and have shut down their INR deposits and withdrawals.

Koinex

Koinex was once leading the race of cryptocurrency trades in India. Sometimes even leaving Zebpay behind in volumes. Today, the reported volume on Koinex is a little over a quarter of a million USD. At this rate, it can even be de-listed from Coinmarketcap because the minimum daily volume requirement for CMC is 1 Million USD.

Bitbns

Now, a leading cryptocurrency exchange Koinex is struggling to pull off a million dollar USD volume and India’s biggest cryptocurrency exchange Zebpay is reporting less than 2 Million USD volume. In comes Bitbns with 1.1 Million USD volume. It is slightly unbelievable because the volume does not match with the website statistics like page visits, unique users, etc

We used Similar Web to compare some of the data on users from all these websites. In the last 28 days, Bitbns had an average 12.5k daily visitors, Zebpay had 17.5k and Koinex had a whopping 44.8k daily visitors.

Between April and June, Bitbns had 694k average monthly visitors, coindelta had 684k, Zebpay had 507k and Koinex had 2.8M average monthly visitors. Bitbns had 113k unique visitors and koinex had 290k unique visitors.

So, the question one must ask is that how is Koinex, the exchange leading the website data charts is only pulling 300k USD in volume while Bitbns lagging behind Koinex by a huge margin is able to get 1.1 M USD trade volume?

Is Bitbns Faking the volumes?

Despite pointing out twice in the past if we still receive reports for volume manipulation, there is definitely something wrong with it. The evidence above shows that there is a manipulation of volume on the exchange. You cannot deny the volumes that are clearly reported on atleast the low volume coins. Bitbns does not have as many site visitors as many other exchanges as well.

Bitbns has come a long way from when it began. Currently Bitbns enjoys the top position in number of listed cryptocurrencies on an exchange in India. 61 cryptoassets can be traded for INR fiat on Bitbns. They don’t need to fake their trade volumes. If they are low, so be it. Everyone is bearing the brunt across the globe.

Do you think Bitbns volumes are inflated? Let us know in the comments below.