LBank has become the leading crypto-to-crypto exchange by trading volume in July, thanks to a 42% rise over the month of June – partly fueled by large trades.
According to CryptoCompare’s July 2019 Exchange Review, LBank surpassed other leading crypto-to-crypto exchanges like OKEx and CoinBene in trading volume last month, even though the report does not include it in its “top tier” exchanges, with a D-rating.
The rating comes from CryptoCompare’s Exchange Benchmark, which ranks over 100 active spot cryptocurrency exchanges throughout the world according to several metrics, and assigns them a rating according to their legitimacy. The tool was produced largely as a response to concerns surrounding fake trading volumes, and designed to bring greater clarity to the crypto exchange sector.
The report’s data shows that “top-tier exchanges” (ranked AA to B) like Binance, Bitstamp, and Coinbase fell behind in terms of trade sizes and trading volumes. While LBank’s average trade size was of 3.7 BTC, the average trade size of Binance was of about 1 BTC, with those of Coinbase being even lower.
This means LBank’s average trade size was roughly 15 times higher than that of trust exchanges. Other untrusted exchanges such as Coinsbit and CoinBene also report significant trade sizes of 1.6 and 1.1 BTC respectively.
LBank’s trade sizes were so large that it managed to lead the crypto-to-crypto exchange space in terms of trading volume last month, despite having a significantly smaller trade count throughout July.
Source: CryptoCompare Exchange Review
CryptoCompare’s report further adds that exchanges like HitBTC, OKEx, and ZB showed trade sizes more in line with those of top cryptocurrency exchanges with fiat trading pairs, of 0.26 BTC to 0.1 BTC.
The report further shows that Lbank’s average trade sizes surged month-over-month, even though the number of trades on the platform dropped. In May its average trade size was of less than 0.5 BTC, while in June it closed in on 1 BTC per trade. Last month, it jumped to 3.7 BTC per trade.
This, despite a decreasing number of trades. On its website LBank has a number of “activities” under a tab that seem to show those using an LBK token can get a trading discount on specific cryptocurrencies.
This could mean whales are using the platform’s token to snap up cheap tokens, and then sell them for a 50% profit on other exchanges. To get the discounted tokens, however, there’s a “subscription lottery” format being used, which means users can’t just buy the tokens directly at a discount.
LBank’s chart on some trading pairs, however, do seem to show something is off. On a DLX/USDT trading pair the platform claims to have a $10 million trading volume, the charts don’t look too organic:
DLX is a little-known cryptocurrency that isn’t listed on most cryptocurrency data aggregators, and isn’t traded on most other exchanges. The only other exchanges it seems to been on is one called Piexgo, where it has a $30,000 trading volume.
