It's hard to tell wash trading from legitimate trading.
Because I'm involved with a committee on financial semantics I wound up learning a bit about swap trading. For stocks if you don't like your long or short position you can buy or sell and it is done.
In the case of swaps if you don't like your position you write another swap contract that is the opposite of the one you don't like. Both are on the books. In the 2008 crisis the size of outstanding swap liabilities dwarfed the real economy, but when you added them all up they mostly canceled out, both in the aggregate and for almost all of the market participants.
Looking at a situation like that which is hard to unravel people are going to make assumptions about the motives and ethics of the participants which are not substantiated.
It will be nigh impossible to prove wash trading without the exchange being very obvious or primary trader identification.
Famously, a Mt. Gox data leak actually proved wash trading on that exchange conclusively as same trader IDs took their own orders. [1] So there definitely is proven precedent in the crypto market.
I am not saying it doesn't happen and isn't likely on unaudited/unregulated exchanges. I just want to highlight that the authors make very strong claims and alternative explanations should be explored.
Because I'm involved with a committee on financial semantics I wound up learning a bit about swap trading. For stocks if you don't like your long or short position you can buy or sell and it is done.
In the case of swaps if you don't like your position you write another swap contract that is the opposite of the one you don't like. Both are on the books. In the 2008 crisis the size of outstanding swap liabilities dwarfed the real economy, but when you added them all up they mostly canceled out, both in the aggregate and for almost all of the market participants.
Looking at a situation like that which is hard to unravel people are going to make assumptions about the motives and ethics of the participants which are not substantiated.