CoinMarketCap removes Bitfinex from exchange calculations

After a week of drama surrounding iFinex Inc., which operates Bitfinex and owns Tether Ltd., CoinMarketCap has decided to remove Bitfinex’s price data from its calculations.

Bitfinex data excluded from CoinMarketCap
A report by TIE on Mar. 20, 2019, exposed that almost 60 percent of the top 100 cryptocurrency exchanges were reporting fake volumes. As a result, CMC announced in a blog post the creation of Data Accountability & Transparency Alliance (DATA) in order to provide “greater transparency, accountability, and disclosure from projects in the crypto space.”

It gave exchanges a grace period of 45 days to provide information on live trading and order book data as a requirement to include their price on the site.

However, following a $300 premium on Bitfinex prices, CoinMarketCap decided to exclude it from its market cap estimation. The crypto market data tracker site has removed other companies in the past, such as Bithump, Coinone, and Korbit, due to “the extreme divergence in prices from the rest of the world and limited arbitrage opportunity.”

At the time of writing, one BTC is worth $6,056 on Bitfinex, while on Coinbase, Bitstamp, and Binance the coin is trading at around $5,735.

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Bitfinex has experienced a massive exodus of traders since the New York Attorney office announced that it had obtained a court order against its parent company. The investigation determined that the exchange engaged in a cover-up to hide the apparent loss of $850 million. Now the firm has been required to cease further dissipation of US dollar assets which back Tether tokens while the investigation continues.

It seems like Tether holders have been exchanging their tokens for other cryptocurrencies, such as bitcoin, Ether, and other stablecoins, to move them out of the exchange. This is likely the cause for the sudden increase in prices on the platform leading up to its removal from CMC.