A recently issued report from the Blockchain Transparency Institute analyzed high-volume bitcoin "trading pairs" on various cryptocurrency exchanges and found "clear evidence of wash trading" on 22 of 25 exchanges analyzed. A bitcoin "trading pair" is an exchange of bitcoin for another type of cryptocurrency (or vice versa), and "wash trading" is a form of market manipulation where an investor simultaneously buys and sells the same financial instrument to create artificial market activity. The report claims to have identified four different "bot strategies" used to artificially inflate bitcoin trading pair volumes via wash trading on cryptocurrency exchanges. According to the report, over 80 percent of the top bitcoin trading pairs volume reported by CoinMarketCap is wash traded, with most of the trading pairs having actual volume under 1 percent of their reported volume.

Another recent report analyzed website traffic on the most frequently used cryptocurrency exchanges and found that many cryptocurrency exchanges with low website traffic report high transaction volumes. According to the report, this indicates that some cryptocurrency exchanges may be artificially inflating the dollar value of transactions processed on their platforms. Cryptocurrency market manipulation is also the topic of a recently published research paper co-authored by professors from four different universities that provides a detailed examination of "pump and dump" schemes in the cryptocurrency markets. The report's findings suggest that such schemes are "widespread and often quite profitable."

According to a recent Bloomberg article, a large U.S. hedge fund acknowledged emerging contingencies related to initial coin offerings (ICOs) by citing the risk that a significant percentage of ICOs it had invested in may be found in violation of U.S. securities laws. An analysis published Dec. 17 found rising outflows of Ethereum (ETH) from wallets reportedly controlled by ICO projects, with over 400,000 ETH moving out of ICO team wallets over a 30-day period. Another recently released analysis found that of the over 460 million "public key" addresses on the bitcoin blockchain, only about 172 million were "economically relevant" in that they are "controlled by people or services who currently own bitcoin," with the remaining 63 percent of addresses used only temporarily to facilitate transactions.

Another apparent trend, reported by Diar, found that institutional bitcoin trading appears to be shifting away from traditional exchanges in favor of over-the-counter markets. Finally, the University of Cambridge has released its 2nd Global Cryptoasset Benchmarking Study, which "gathers survey data from more than 180 cryptoasset companies and individuals, covering 47 countries across five world regions" and provides analysis focused on mining, exchange, storage and payments. In one notable finding, the study reports that in the first three quarters of 2018, the number of ID-verified cryptocurrency users almost doubled, increasing from 18 million to 35 million.

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