There’s something fishy going on with the numbers over at CoinMarketCap. The site, which aggregates nearly all the surface-level information an investor would want to know about the cryptocurrency market, has repeatedly been caught with incorrect information for Bitcoin SV (BSV).
The first instance dates back to March 12, when a Twitter user noticed that the site had numbers that were way off the correct circulating supply for BSV.
@CoinMarketCap I think there is something weird with the data you are publishing in your site, for instance, the current supply of $BSV was wrong today, march 11, at utc 22:47: 12.67M instead of 17.67M, then at 11:32 it was 13.29M, then at 0:41 15.55M… now 16.07M! Can you help?
— esthon 🇧🇷22🇧🇷 (@esthon) March 12, 2019
The user wondered if the site was somehow artificially manipulating the numbers to make it appear BSV had less coins in circulation than was probably true on other, less frequented sites. CoinMarketCap responded that this wasn’t the case, and it was all merely a discrepancy caused by an “exchange outlier.”
The same eagle-eyed observer noticed once again on Thursday that the site’s numbers were off. CoinMarketCap is showing a circulation of 17.67 million, the correct number should be 17.71 million, representing 40,000 coins missing from the tally.
Again again you are with incorrect data. It looks like the $BSV current supply is freeze since the last time I reported here. After almost a month the current supply for BSV in your site, is the same: 17.67M instead of 17.71M.
— esthon 🇧🇷22🇧🇷 (@esthon) April 4, 2019
The number on CoinMarketCap is correct by several other sites, including at Blockchair, Tokenview and CoinGecko. So what is exactly going on here?
There’s a couple of theories we can look at. Their numbers could once again be thrown off by an exchange, from which they are aggregating their data, having outdated statistics on BSV.
A more insidious theory could be that the site is indeed artificially manipulating their information to prop up certain cryptos and downplay others. Investors have been known to look at circulating supply to determine if a crypto has a respectable size for its value and market cap, and depressing that number could drive some investors to other cryptos.
The most mundane answer this writer could think of was they put in a static number the first time the supply statistic was wrong, and never remembered to update it later on.
No matter what the explanation is, to have a completely incorrect statistic listed for BSV, the highest twelfth crypto in market cap at press time, is an embarrassment for a site that exists to only provide information and statistics. CoinMarketCap needs to fix this and explain what happened, and quickly.
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