South Korean Exchanges Cut by CoinMarketCap

After an active weekend, which lead the whole crypto market to a new high of $800 billion and some crypto exchanges were closed, the analytics website CoinMarketCap made a decision to cut data from South Korean exchanges.

PRICE PERPLEXITY

Most media outlets and crypto traders have been getting their figures and charts from what has become the putative standard source – Coinmarketcap.com. For each digital asset and crypto exchange the website offers live charts and statistic information. As the website decided to exclude South Korean Bithumb, the move caused panic selling from users. Other Korean exchanges, such as Coinone and Korbit also were excluded, but remain responsible for large trade volumes.

XRP seems to have suffered badly as it is traded heavily in South Korea, collapsing 16% in a matter of seconds when the switch was flipped. The fall has enabled Ethereum to retake second position on the market cap charts.

ALTERNATIVE ANALYTICS

Also want to mention, that there are other analytics websites, but it is not clear if they get their prices direct from various exchanges across the world or from Coinmarketcap. For example, Worldcoinindex.com shows almost the same prices and charts as CoinMarketCap. On the other hand, Livecoinwatch.com still includes South Korean exchanges, as the total market value is higher around $35 billion than it is showed on CMC.

There is often higher demand for certain cryptocurrencies locally than internationally which would explain the discrepancies. While prices on South Korean exchanges are often higher than elsewhere, it still remains perplexing why an analytics website would exclude up to 20% of the total crypto market trade volume which happens to occur in this one Southeast Asian nation.