Investing.com - Cryptocurrencies slumped on Friday as a report from the Blockchain Transparency Institute found that wash trading still dominates most Bitcoin trading volumes.
Bitcoin was down 4% to $3,296.90 on the Investing.com Index, as of 9:08 AM ET (14:08 GMT).
Digital coins have fallen dramatically in recent weeks traders worry about increased regulatory scrutiny and volatility.
Cryptocurrencies overall were lower, with the total coin market capitalization at $104 billion at the time of writing, compared to $109 billion on Thursday.
Ethereum, or Ether, decreased 5% to $85.65 and Litecoin was at $23.29, down 3.5%, while XRP was down 2.9% to $0.29461.
Fake trading makes up about 80% of the top 25 Bitcoin pairs by volume, a report from the Blockchain Transparency Institute found. Called wash trading, its a form of manipulation by which an investor both sells and buys to create misleading activity on the market.
“Most of these pairs actual volume is under 1% of their reported volume on [CoinMarketCap]. We noted only 2 out of the top 25 pairs not to be grossly wash trading their volume, Binance and Bitfinex,” the report said.
In other news, digital token protocol Basis announced it is halting operations and returned its capital to investors due to regulatory concerns.
The company cited the “serious negative impact” of the need to comply with U.S. securities regulation.
“As regulatory guidance started to trickle out over time, our lawyers came to a consensus that there would be no way to avoid securities status for bond and share tokens, though Basis would like to be free of this characterization,” Basis CEO Nader Al-Naji said in a statement.