Asian Exchanges Adopt Controversial Counting Method For Futures Trades

Trading volumes reported by exchanges in Asia became a talking point again over the past weekend, after some companies altered the way trades are counted on bitcoin futures markets.
The latest issue arose last week when OKCoin‘s manager of foreign operations Zane Tackett posted a thread on reddit’s ‘Bitcoin Markets’ page, titled “You might have noticed OKCoin futures volume experienced a sudden rise (doubled) over night, here’s why”.
OKCoin, Tackett wrote, had noticed competitors 796.com and BitVC (a subsidiary of Huobi) were employing a counting method that regards a single bitcoin traded as two units: one bought and one sold.
In doing so, OKCoin’s 24-hour high volume that week leaped instantly from 300,000 BTC to 600,000 BTC. The company did not retroactively alter historic trading data before that date.
Industry standard?
Since other exchanges were employing this “industry standard”, it made sense for OKCoin to do the same, he said, while revealing the information publicly in the interests of transparency.
Tackett made it clear, however, that OKCoin does not necessarily endorse this counting method and was simply following others so that comparisons could remain accurate.

This post was published at Coin Desk on November 10, 2014.