Crypto markets data aggregator CoinMarketCap yesterday changed its methodology to rank exchanges on their web traffic past default — a metric that puts CoinMarketCap's new owners  Binance in the top spot.

But this stands in stark dissimilarity to the words of CoinMarketCap's Principal Strategy Officer and acting CEO Carylyne Chan, who said in a podcast interview late last year that spider web traffic was "not a good indicator."

Introduced only six weeks afterwards Binance bought CoinMarketCap for hundreds of millions of dollars, the new ranking methodology prioritizes web traffic over CMC'southward painstakingly developed "liquidity metric," which was merely introduced in November and was due to become the default ranking.

When ranked by average liquidity, Binance lands in fourth identify, following Bitfinex, Coinbase Pro, and Huobi Global respectively.

Indications are not adept

On an episode of the podcast Blockchain Journeys recorded at the Capital Conference in Singapore in November, where the liquidity metric was introduced, Chan was asked specifically about using spider web traffic as a metric. She said:

"We've seen other people do things like y'all've said, web traffic as a way [to verify exchanges are legitimate] but people trade using API keys so that's why web traffic is not a skilful indicator."

Merely CoinMarketCap's May xiii blog post makes a very different argument:

"With crypto being a retail-driven market place, for an exchange to take high volumes, it needs to have a big number of retail traders (i.e. buyers and sellers). Instead of asking exchanges to submit their user numbers, a good intermediate proxy volition exist web traffic. Equally such, we have designed the Web Traffic Factor in this iteration."

The Web Traffic Factor is a combination score that provides dissimilar weightings to: "pageviews, unique visitor count, bounce rate, time-on-site, relative ranking and keyword searches on major search engines". This may address some of Chan's before concerns.

After the original version of this story was published, Chan responded on Twitter saying: "If yous read our post in full, traffic is simply *1 of many factors* that will brand up the final algorithm. I accept said *more recently* that speed is imperative, hence we're iterating instead of waiting months. Faster = more feedback = better for users. Side by side iteration: End of May."

One ranking to rule them all...

The web log post went on to say that it would introduce a single page to rank exchanges (instead of multiple pages) that will be "sorted by the new metric, Web Traffic Factor, by default, while preserving the other metrics (east.k. Liquidity Score, volumes, markets) in the subsequent columns."

The post did non give an explanation why CMC was prioritizing web traffic over its liquidity metric. CMC said in November that the liquidity metric "is designed to eventually replace book as the default metric when ranking marketplace pairs and exchanges."

'Existent Ten' exchanges

In the 60 minutes-long podcast interview, Chan also rejected another method of examining gild volume depth, along with Bitwise's list of 10 exchanges with "existent book" — of which Binance is one.

"You mentioned the Bitwise report. So what it does is choose ten exchanges they think are reputable and that they verified as practiced, just really I remember just eyeballing some of those who passed the tests are also washing trades... so that'south not comprehensive."

Chan ended of the three approaches: "I think all of these are not-information-driven, they are very subjective. And so for united states of america, when we are looking for a solution we try to avoid logical errors similar this and be more data driven."

CMC and CZ agree that at that place are issues

In the weblog postal service announcing the change, CMC acknowledged the limitations of the new measure out that had put their owners on top:

"We are enlightened that web traffic will not provide the full film, every bit there are traders who merchandise using API keys, for case. This metric is, equally shared in a higher place, an intermediate step in this iterative process."

Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao conceded on Twitter the metric is "not "100% accurate."

CMC is independent

Binance bought CMC (for a reported merely unconfirmed $400 one thousand thousand) in early on April, and downplayed concerns about the conflict of interest generated by an commutation owning the aforementioned site that reports exchange volumes:

"CoinMarketCap will keep to be run every bit an contained business entity. While the Binance cryptocurrency commutation and its native token BNB are listed on CoinMarketCap, CoinMarketCap and Binance are separate entities that maintain a strict policy of independence from ane some other: Binance has no bearing on CoinMarketCap rankings, while CoinMarketCap has no influence over Binance'due south operations."

Annotation: This story has been updated to include Carylyne Chan'due south response.