The crypto market is hot. But is it an illusion?

0:00NPR.

0:11The cryptocurrency market has been especially frothy in recent months. According to Coindesk, trading activity on crypto exchanges clocked in at$9.7 trillion last month. To put how much that is in perspective, that makes it the busiest month for crypto trading this year and almost twice as busy as the same time last year. But what if a lot of this trading activity is an illusion? And what if it's really a smokescreen for fraud? This is The Indicator from Planet Money. I'm Adrian Ma. And I'm Waylon Wong. A few years ago, we did an episode on an emerging practice in the crypto market called wash trading.

0:49Today on the show, we'll look at how the practice is evolving and what regulators are doing about it.

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1:43Luckily, the Dell PC helps you get it all done. Get yours at dell.com slash holiday. This message comes from Mint Mobile. Starting at$15 a month, make the switch at mintmobile.com slash switch. $45 upfront payment for three months. 5GB plan equivalent to$15 a month. Taxes and fees extra. First three months only. See terms. Most crypto trading happens on platforms that are unregulated by government watchdogs. And according to a 2023 study done by researchers in the UK, US and China, about 70 percent of trading that happens on these unregulated platforms is actually wash trading. Leah Foley is U.S.

2:24attorney for the District of Massachusetts, and she explains wash trading like this. Wash trading occurs when a single trader or a number of traders working in coordination buy and sell the same asset to generate misleading market information. All right. So here's an example. Let's say Adrian and I have our new very own crypto token. Get it while you can. Indicator coin. OK, so Adrian, I sell it to you. OK, and then I sell it back to you. And then I sell it back to you. And as we go back and forth, the trading volume for IndicatorCoin goes up, the price goes up, and unsuspecting investors look at this and they think, wow, IndicatorCoin must be a good investment.

3:11And this is how we get you. Leah says this is a classic use case for wash trading. So the wash trades facilitate pump and dump schemes by creating the false appearance of a robust and active trading market with lots of holders and traders. But unscrupulous token creators are not the only ones who can benefit from wash trading. Crypto exchanges, you know, the platforms where people buy and sell crypto, also have an incentive to do it. In order to make money, crypto exchanges need users. But these users, they want to be where the action is, where a lot of trading is happening. And many researchers believe that crypto exchanges have often engaged in wash trading to artificially boost trading volumes and entice these users onto their platforms.

3:55Shi Li teaches finance at the University of Reading in the UK. And she co-authored that 2023 study exploring how wash trading is used in crypto markets. And when more traders come in, you know, they will contribute a transaction fee. So that would be a very important revenue for crypto exchanges. So wash trading is one way for crypto exchanges to pump up their trading volume, to fake it until they make it. So that's the basic idea behind wash trading. But in the age of crypto, the way wash trading is done has gone through a few evolutions. Yang Yang is a lecturer at the University of Bristol, also in the UK.

4:32He worked on the same study as Shi Li, and he says in the early days of crypto, companies employed what he calls wash trading 1.0. So basically, exchanges just print out fake trades on their database. So this is a very simple and effective way. but the drawback is people can spot this easily. Like almost as if you have an accounting ledger and you just like write in fake entries. And demonstrate them on their front-end websites. Yeah, because this method was so easy to spot, Yang says companies eventually moved on to what he calls wash trading 2.0. That's where a company uses bots or hires an outside firm to execute wash trades.

5:17And he says this is harder to catch because you're not just adding numbers to a ledger. These trades, whether they're being done by humans or bots, are actually happening. But sort of like a Potemkin village, it's all a facade. For a while, U.S. regulators had been slow to figure out how to tackle the growing problem of wash trading. But last year, the U.S. Department of Justice announced an approach that was at once new and old-fashioned. They launched a sting called Operation Token Mirrors. Who comes up with the names for these sting operations? Truly a joint effort. I would love to be in that brainstorming session.

5:55I'm just picturing everyone wearing FBI jackets. Operation Whalen Kicks Butt. Ooh, I like the sound of that. By the way, that was U.S. Attorney Leah Foley again talking with their producer, Cooper. Leah explained how Operation Token Mirrors was designed to catch crypto companies engaged in wash trading. Her office worked with the FBI on the case. So they actually set up a company and created their own crypto currency. And they included a website for the fake crypto. Then the FBI, posing as this crypto company, approached various people who offered volume support services, which is basically a less incriminating way of saying, we'll do wash trading for you.

6:41And when they did, this is about the time the feds sprang out of the bushes and yelled, gotcha. As a result of this operation, the DOJ charged 18 individuals and companies with fraud and manipulation in the crypto market. Thus far, eight different defendants have pled guilty. And there are some people who pled guilty and fled the United States and others who are just outside the jurisdiction of the United States but are still charged. Leah says her office will continue to pursue illegal activity in the crypto markets. But a few months ago, the Trump administration dropped a lawsuit against the largest crypto trading platform, Binance.

7:23The company had been accused of mishandling customer funds, lying to regulators and engaging in wash trading. Even without the feds breathing down their neck, crypto companies can still exploit gray areas in the law. And one of our digital currency experts, Yang Yang, says Binance is actually a great example. Not long ago, Binance launched a program called Alpha Points. Basically, it's a system that incentivizes traders to keep actively trading. The more they trade, the more points they can earn. And the more points they get, the more they can redeem them for rewards. And this helps pump up the trading volume on Binance.

7:59Yang actually calls this Wash Trading 3.0. So in this case, you can even argue, does this even count for as Wash Trading or not? But in our opinion, the purpose of this large-scale trading is still just to boost up volume. We reached out to Binance for comment. A Binance spokesperson, Simon Matthews, rejected the comparison to wash trading. He added that users can choose how to engage with Binance Alpha and that they do not have to trade. Which I guess brings us back to where we started. While there is certainly a lot of buzz around crypto right now, It is worth keeping in mind that this industry is still pretty unregulated, and things may not always be as they appear.

8:46This episode was produced by Cooper Katz McKim with engineering by Gilly Moon. It was fact-checked by Sierra Juarez and edited by Julia Ritchie. Kate and Ken is our editor, and the Indicators is a production of NPR. Can you do your best Joe Bluth impression? What's a line that Joe Bluth says? They're illusions, Michael.

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