How to Be a Trillionaire Crypto Crash

One bitcoin was worth $779 billions

Late Tuesday afternoon, cryptocurrency pricing aggregation site CoinMarketCap.com, which is owned by Binance, self-dubbed “the world’s most trusted cryptocurrency data authority," was hit with a shocking cyber failure or attack that artificially inflated individual crypto coins' value ¹.

A system failure that artificially sent coin and token prices skyrocketing to valuations in the tens of billions of dollars per unit. At 5 p.m. EST, CoinMarketCap acknowledged the pricing issues via Twitter:

“Our website is currently undergoing Price Issues - The Engineering team is aware of incorrect price information appearing on CoinMarketCap.com. We are currently investigating and will update this status when we have more information." - @CoinMarketCap Twitter

How did it feel to be a trillionaire for a couple of hours?

Crypto traders experienced a moment of joy, followed by confusion, when a glitch caused several data aggregators to briefly display enormous gains for Bitcoin, Ether and other cryptocurrencies ².

The momentary glitch also impacted Cointelegraph’s price indexes. CoinMarketCap and several other price indexes showed Bitcoin’s price closing to $900 billion as ETH showed over $81 billion ³.

Even prices of cryptocurrencies listed on Coinbase Global Inc. briefly went haywire, with many tokens showing astronomical gains, noting that trading wasn’t impacted. A few minutes later, Coinbase said it’s still investigating asset price and trade difficulties in Coinbase Wallet, which allows customers to manage their crypto assets ⁴.

“Following the irregularities we observed on our platform this afternoon, despite the issue having been fixed, we will be rebooting our servers as a final step in accordance with our internal remediation plan. Apologies for the inconvenience." - @CoinMarketCap Twitter

What Happens Now?

The timing for this massive mishap is especially bad given that the Senate Banking Committee hearing earlier in the day was generally negative regarding stablecoins and crypto in general.

Every witness who appeared in front of the committee seemed to have their own rallying cry for U.S. lawmakers, from calling for greater KYC/AML compliance to “avoid policies that encourage the growth of stablecoins." [5]

Sites like CoinMarketCap and CoinGecko are gatekeepers of the crypto world for retail audiences. They track pricing and trading data on crypto exchanges in real-time — referencing the data against each other for a double-check — before publishing prices on their site. But as with all things technology, mistakes do occur.

I was a crypto enthusiast many years ago, on recommendation if you want to get practical, easy to understand cryptocurrency skills, learn from industry experts like Andreas M. Antonopoulos [6] or from the official website like Bitcoin.org [7]

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