You Should Not Trust Coinmarketcap For Accurate Information and DYOR. Binance Owns Them and Manipulates Their Data

In April 2020, Coinmarketcap(CMC) was acquired by Binance.

CMC Disclosure Page

Now, CMC and Binance maintain that:

CoinMarketCap and Binance are separate entities that maintain a strict policy of independence from one another: Binance has no bearing on CoinMarketCap rankings, while CoinMarketCap has no influence over Binance’s operations.

But we know how business is really run and this is just legalese to maintain the image of separation and no conflict on interest. To prove this statement is not true, we need only look at the data CMC presents.

Looking at the exchange data, this is the top 3 exchanges.

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CMC Exchange Rankings

Binance has been at the top of this list for YEARS. Their score of 9.9 has never dropped. And other exchange lag behind Binance by almost TWO WHOLE POINTS. This has been the structure of the list for years. Even FTX was ranked at around 8(didn't prove to be worth much anyhow). My point is here we see how Binance manipulates the data to have their exchange far above the competition with a score of 9.9 that indicates near perfection which we all know is not true.

Also, they choose to rank the exchanges based on criteria that HEAVILY favours Binance. Binance ranks exchanges on these four criteria.

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https://preview.redd.it/zgchgnjvmv1a1.png?743&format=png&auto=webp&s=a480b66033d904a143484a77401990449d2097da

We can certainly see how the first three heavily favour Binance. In particular, for web traffic score:

https://preview.redd.it/rz7csvd2nv1a1.png?758&format=png&auto=webp&s=79ae81cacc20259ae81950a3c85a987ce37df747

Basically the top exchange is given maximum points and other exchanges are ranked relative to the top exchange. Nobody here cannot tell me this is not an absolutely terrible and extremely biased way of ranking. What is worse is Binance has been found many times to operate in jurisdictions without licenses, in at least a dozen countries according to WSJ for which they have quite a number of cases against them as there were also reports of them trying to illegally get around US securities laws and regulations. I mean to say that they "cheated" their way to the top to gain a wide market share and now is using that factor to manipulate a "trusted" web resource to raise their ranking. Think about all those new to crypto who may go to CMC for information and they all see Binance far and away at the top with a 9.9 score; think about how heavily that may influence their decision of which exchange to use.

Just prior to Binance buying CMC, Binance was ranked 14th in early April 2020.

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CMC Exchange Ranking just before Binance acquires CMC

SoMEhOw, a month after the deal in May, CMC was ranked first after instituting the same "Web Traffic Score". As far as I can tell, Binance has never fallen from 1st rank since CMC was acquired by Binance. If this doesn't scream manipulation I don't know what does.

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CMC Exhange Ranking after Binance acquires CMC

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Apart from exchange ranking CMC also is a large aggregator of token prices and price changes. What is stopping them from "influencing" the price and price changes of their own tokens like BNB and perhaps even BUSD(to prevent depegs/stifle stablecoin competition). On this point while anecdotal, I visit CMC a lot and have noticed BNB's price often seems slightly higher than on other exchanges & aggregators as well as BNB almost always perform better than other stablecoins tho this could be coincidental.

What also stops them from manipulating tokens of other competing firms/projects. They also rank all tokens, so why not manipulate that the way the exchange rankings are manipulated. We have all seen that it doesn't even take much, just a nudge in the right direction to cause a complete market collapse or even a full-on market pump, even if it is based on false or shaky information. We know that Binance now owns the largest reserves of Bitcoin, so what stops them from manipulating that, to maybe cause a pump and then sell some reserves for profit.

I can go on and on with this but I hope by now we get the point.

Tldr: don't trust Coinmarketcap data as it is some of it is certainly manipulated by Binance if not much of it.