Hey'all!
The Fcoin Exchange is the most HATED exchange right now. It has drawn a lot of hate recently for flooding the ethereum network spam transactions and been accused of promoting wash trading.
FCoin claims to have a daily trading volume of around 3 billion US-Dollar. That's nearly 3x more than the daily volume of the current top exchange Binance. (Source: https://coinmarketcap.com/exchanges/binance/)
FCoin Web Presentation:
The FCoin exchange can be reach via https://www.fcoin.com.
The exchange promotes itself with the following statement: "The FCoin Exchange is a decentralized multi cryptocurrency exchange that lets you trade digital assets with security. The company shares 80% of its fees with the FT token holders." But is that really true?
I took the time to roughly skim the whitepaper & honestly I didn't find anything about the platform being decentralized. It only states that the exchange does not employ traditional centralized corporate structures, nor does it have a CEO or board of directors - it is the first autonomous community-based trading platform. (Source: https://www.fcoin.com/ft-en.pdf?v=1.3 | Page 6)
To summarize this one more time: It is NOT a decentralized financial-level trading platform.
FCoin Mining Output
The second thing that is pretty obvious to see is a Mining Overview on the upper Main page.
As seen on CoinMarketCap, the total coin supply of FCoin is 2,510,925,464 FT. The thing that actually confuses me is the fact, that the website states a current circulating supply of 3,420,872,300 FT.
CoinMarketCap is well-known for having all the market prices up & running. If FCoin would be a legit exchange, they would at least get in contact with CoinMarketCap to arrange an Update of the values displayed.
Deposit/Withdrawal Fees
As figured out above, the FCoin exchange is centralized. The things shown below will also confirm it. In the table shown below, you see the Withdrawal Limit Indicators. A decentralized exchange would probably never ask you to undergo a KYC (Know Your Customer) since the whole point of decentralisation is being independent and your private information is secure and not held by anyone, in this case the FCoin Exchange.
Furthermore it states: "FCoin platform will verify your account after withdrawal application, considering the security of assets, some accounts need to be manual verified, you are required to provide your personal information if necessary, and can withdraw when it passes verification. When withdrawal successful, it occurs some anomaly cases, please contact online customer service or send email to contact us as soon as possible."
The fact that some parts of the FAQ are actually written in bad and not really understandable english makes me trust the exchange even less.
FCoin Review:
Only 5 days ago, the crypto-news platform "Cryptobriefing" published the article "FCoin Exchange Now Compared To Ponzi Scheme". (Source: https://cryptobriefing.com/fcoin-exchange-now-compared-to-ponzi-scheme/).
Boxmining, a well-known crypto enthusiast has released a full spot on video about the exchange. You can find it here:
FCoin Trading Activity:
Beneath you will see the FT/BTC trading pair. Looks suspicious?
According to the FCoin Exchange, their token which is also called FCoin, has a daily trading volume of 261134.78 BTC.
261134.78 BTC
...
~ 1,757,410,000 USD
Think about that for a second. For comparison, Ethereum has a daily trading volume of $1.4 bln to $1.8 bln USD. Do I really need to explain? I guess you can figure this one out on your own. Clearly something isn't right.
Here is the explanation:
The FCoin Exchange does not rely on investors, but on trading bots. These trading bots are buying and selling cryptocurrencies from eachother which obviously produces volume.
Wouldn't that mean a loss for the exchange?
No. The trading bots are buying and selling the cryptocurrencies from themselves or other linked bots which means that they aren't driving any profit. Think of the trading bots as fishing bait. The bots are only there to add volume to the exchange (through buying & selling, volume is created). The real money is made with the fish, in this case traders & investors.
Actually I have no idea how it is with FCoin, I can only guess that the cryptocurrency transferred to the platform get locked or straight away transferred to another wallet. My second guess would be that the wallet private keys are held by the exchange and users do not have access/control over the wallet.
Here is the third confirmation that the FCoin Exchange is a centralized exchange: A decentralized exchange would not hold any private keys of the exchange users.
That's about it. The FCoin exchange is pure scam, share this post to make other traders aware of it. It's never great to see someone getting scammed. You can make a change and prevent others from getting their money stolen.
Have a good one & be safe,
Mike