On Monday, January 8, the popular cryptocurrency website CoinMarketCap has excluded from the calculations average bitcoin rates and other cryptocurrency data of South Korean exchanges without any prior notification. This is reported by the media and users in social networks.
Representatives of the platform have not yet commented on their decision, which is supposed to lead to a significant decrease in the exchange rates observed today. The vast majority of the assets on the site are currently in a deep red zone.
— Richard Heart (@RichardHeartWin) January 8, 2018
If you use https://t.co/rTG82QaJeq apparently they removed the Korean exchanges from the price index, so everything is more red and down percentage-wise than normal. Because Korea was priced so high. #Bitcoin #Ethereum #ripple #altcoins
Among the most "affected" currencies can be identified Ripple with more than 50% of the trading volume is accounted by exchanges from South Korea.
Nevertheless, if you look at other analytical platforms, for example, Cryptocompare or Livecoinwatch, the average weighted rate of bitcoin and many other cryptocurrencies is slightly lower than on CoinMarketCap.
Also it should be noted that in the "Volume" section, the data of South Korean stock exchanges are still present, and as it can be seen from that data, Bithumb, the largest exchange of South Korea, takes the 4th place in the global rating with the trading volume of $ 2,684 billion for the last 24 hours.
As is known, on the South Korean platforms, cryptocurrencies are traditionally traded at prices, often 10-15% higher than those at other global exchange sites. At the same time, arbitraging is difficult due to the need of indicating the telephone number of the South Korean telecom operator and other information when registering to the platform, and that can be obtained only from South Korea.