Bitfinex’s Bitcoin Price Excluded from CoinMarketCap Average Calculation
Crypto data provider CoinMarketCap has excluded bitcoin prices provided by the troubled Bitfinex exchange from its weighted average calculation.
Cryptocurrency data provider CoinMarketCap has excluded bitcoin prices provided by the troubled Bitfinex exchange from its weighted average calculation.
Now, when checking BTC/USD data on CoinMarketCap, it shows a single asterisk mark for Bitfinex’s price, with the message at the bottom “Price excluded.”
In its methodology description on its website, CoinMarketCap states the conditions for such exclusions saying:
The exclusion from CoinMarketCap's calculations comes as Bitfinex continues to be mired in controversy. Late last month, the New York attorney general alleged that the exchange, which shares management and owners with stablecoin issuer Tether, lost $850 million of corporate and client funds and subsequently used a loan from Tether’s reserves to secretly cover the shortfall.
Bitfinex later claimed that the funds had been “seized” by various authorities and that it was working to retrieve the funds.
Bitfinex has now launched what's termed an initial exchange offering (IEO) to raise as much as $1 billion through a token sale. Though an official white paper for the offering is not yet out, Bitfinex shareholder Dong Zhao has already started taking pre-orders from users who want to participate in the sale.
Last January, Bitfinex and Tether were subpoenaed by the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission, although the regulator did not publicly state why.
CoinMarketCap previously changed the way it used data from Bitfinex in response to a report by CoinDesk that pointed out that a trading pair shown on CoinMarketCap – apparently for trades between the tether stablecoin (USDT) and U.S. dollars – did not, in fact, represent a pair available for trading on Bitfinex. In response, CoinMarketCap said it was excluding that pair from its volume data.
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The data provider also formed a new alliance last week, called the Data Accountability & Transparency Alliance (DATA), with Bitfinex and other exchanges on board, in order to tackle concerns over cryptocurrency data reporting.
Bitcoin and Bitfinex image via Shutterstock; Screenshots via CoinMarketCap and TradingView