DATA Ultimatum: CoinMarketCap Requests More Information From Exchanges to Make Market More Transparent

Recently, CoinMarketCap, arguably the industry's best-known cryptocurrency market data service, announced an initiative to provide "Greater transparency, accountability, and disclosure from projects in the crypto space." The move followed recent reports on fake volume data and wash trading among cryptocurrency exchanges that were published last month.

On May 1, CMC announced that it will require all crypto exchanges to provide mandatory API data, which includes their live trading data and live order book data, as part of a new transparency initiative titled "The Data Accountability & Transparency Alliance".

Specifically, the required data includes exchange hot/cold wallet addresses, live market-pair trading status, live wallet status, and historical trade data.

"As with all API endpoints submitted to us from exchanges we work closely to ensure that the endpoints are up and running effectively. This constitutes the reported volume information that is presented on the site. The adjusted volume metric excludes those exchanges with fee rebates or transaction mining, and with the new mandatory data requirements, those that do not provide their live trade and orderbook data."

"We carefully evaluated the requirements so as to make sure they are reasonable and not unnecessarily onerous for the majority of exchanges to provide. In fact, about 150 exchanges already submit this data, and we are simply waiting for the other exchanges to come up to speed on these data points."

"We prepare and stream raw data from OceanEx to them and CMC is taking a role more of collecting and disclosing data to the public, instead of monitoring. We may have different roles in this program, but we share the same vision and the ultimate goal, that is to benefit the community and the users."

The KuCoin CEO told Cointelegraph that CMC "Mentioned that they will have a team to check all the data submitted, ensuring its accuracy as the DATA project expected."

"The fact that the data from the trading platforms will be collected in real time will expand the possibilities for studying the market and analyzing it and improve the understanding of the characteristics of various exchanges - that's for sure. But this does not mean that the data provided by the websites will be completely objective."

"The same thing applies to the additional information about the exchanges, that is supposed to be submitted by the projects and exchanges by themselves. We don't doubt the fact that it will be really useful for users - as it will be gathered in one place. But in general, we see it as an extension of the functionality of the CMC itself, an increase in its competitiveness in comparison with the other similar data aggregators."

Cointelegraph has reached out to more exchanges currently listed in the top-50 by adjusted volume on CMC that are not part of DATA at this point - including Kraken and Coinbase Pro - but has yet to hear back from them.