Well, Binance is, somehow, dramatically more of a fly-by-night bucket shop intentionally looking the other way to people opening multiple accounts to avoid KYC -- and they won't event tell you in which country they're domiciled.
They're one of Team Tether's top partners in crime.
How on earth can you believe their volume numbers haha.
>intentionally looking the other way to people opening multiple accounts to avoid KYC
That's blatantly false. Many have been caught trying to circumvent via VPN or similar, it's just impossible to catch quite everyone no matter how hard you try.
In fact "Malta ... question mark?" is about as much information as we have.
And the KYC evade is just based on opening more accounts before you reach their threshold. Because rather than operating like a real business, requiring everyone to provide KYC during onboarding, they just look the other way.
Binance has never been in Malta, in fact they are not located anywhere. I would be very cautious in dealing with them because to me that kind of approach to regulation doesnt sound healthy.
> For example, the company’s chief growth officer, Ted Lin, told Decrypt just a few days ago, “We have offices in Malta for customer services, and some compliance people there, but it’s not the headquarters per say [sic]. It’s the spiritual headquarters. It’s a name that people think about when they think about Binance.”
> [Binance established their headquarters in Malta] soon after the Maltese government passed laws that provided a regulatory framework for businesses operating in the Cryptocurrency and Blockchain industry. The regulation officially passed into a law on July 4th 2018. Malta remains the only country in the world to officially pass such laws.
The Coindesk article from 2020 states:
> Until February [of 2020], Binance was considered to be based in Malta. That changed when the island European nation announced that, no, Binance is not under its jurisdiction. Since then Binance has not said just where, exactly, it is now headquartered.
And quotes CZ:
> “Well, I think what this is is the beauty of the blockchain, right, so you don’t have to … like where’s the Bitcoin office, because Bitcoin doesn’t have an office.” [1]
The Wikipedia article is stale, and incorrect on the basis of the subsequent statements from executives involved.
I doubt they are inflating them and it's trivial to check by going on both CB and Binance, looking at the order books and executing a few orders against them.
Right, you know in a completely unregulated market, you can just put fake things on the books yeah?
Remember that ETF that was trying to list a few years ago said 95% of all volume in the crypto space was fake. [1] Now, at the time, they included Binance as a legitimate exchange but you know nobody's looking and they can do literally whatever they want.
That designation is especially suspect as:
> Of the 10 exchanges, only Binance isn’t a money services business (MSB)
Consider of course this was 2 years ago.
This whole space is utterly uninvestable.
So let me reverse the question -- on what basis do you believe these unregulated fly by night bucket shops are on the up and up? What have they done to prove their legitimacy to you?
I mean, how can what's on the book be be fake if my trades are executed faster, the spread is smaller and I can take advantage of the higher liquidity??
Those things aren't just arbitrary numbers with no effect, if you are trading it's pretty noticable where the volume is higher even if you don't look at the order book.
Sorry? They most certainly can be arbitrary numbers. [1]
You know 99% of all LTC trading on Coinbase was one account trading back and forth with itself a couple years ago. Spoof trading involves putting up a big order, then yanking it at the last second before it gets executed.
If you're the house, you can do literally anything if only the fox is watching the henhouse. As the peer response states, if you're the house, you know which orders are yours so there's zero risk of them accidentally getting filled. You put fake orders on the books, you fake close them, and report them as a real transaction in the log. The liquidity can just be pretend.
.. Again that's all good in theory but in practice you can verify by trading. My orders do get filled faster on Binance, I can take advantage of the better spread and liquidity etc. The majority of orders aren't just disappearing randomly or anything.
It's especially obvious when trading higher amounts or trading a smaller liquidity token in the first place. Maybe I can't verify the actual numbers but I can very much verify there's more liquidity etc. than when I do the same transactions on a smaller exchange (and I'm on ~5 exchanges).
No you cannot verify by trading lol, any more than you can verify the payout ratio of a slot machine at a rigged casino. They can synthesize opening and closing the orders, matching them internally, based off a feed from a legitimate exchange. Since they control everything they can easily ensure they don't accidentally get matched to an external order. This gives the illusion of liquidity.
>any more than you can verify the payout ratio of a slot machine at a rigged casino.
If I use a slot machine a million times and I get higher payouts than at the casino next door, why should I consider it rigged?
This is just nonsense. I am getting all the benefits of high liquidity and volume, my orders actually execute and I take advantage of the smaller spread. You can posit whatever you want, but the more likely explanation is that the volume is indeed higher.
They have not provided you with any reason to believe them. They won't even tell you where they're located lol.
This was a common growth hack for exchanges. When a new exchange launched they wanted to feign liquidity to establish a sense of credibility. They literally copied feeds from peer exchanges until they bootstrapped.
After all, why would anyone trade at an illiquid exchange? How do you get the first people onboard? You pretend you already have a lot of people onboard. More volume = more credibility.
The question you should ask yourself is if nobody is looking, why would they ever stop?
[note] by "growth hack" I mean literally a felony in any other context, but in the crypto space shrug who cares I guess. After all in which jurisdiction would you even sue them lol. Thanks to the "beauty of the blockchain" they won't even tell you where they're based.
correct. the part that seems to evade people's mental model of this process is that the exchanges know which orders in the book are theirs, but the customers do not, so there's no risk whatsoever of the exchange filling an order that works against their balance sheet. it all looks perfectly organic from the outside.
They're one of Team Tether's top partners in crime.
How on earth can you believe their volume numbers haha.