Quick Take
A bug on the CoinMarketCap website makes it looks like every crypto’s price has shot into the stratosphere.
This includes bitcoin, which is shown to have a price of $789 billion per coin.
Crypto data aggregator CoinMarketCap turned heads on Tuesday evening with a website bug resulting in eye-popping figures for prices, market capitalizations and more.
The bug was live for about one hour and has now been fixed.
In a tweet at 5 p.m. ET, the site's operators acknowledged the pricing issues, saying that "[t]he Engineering team is aware of incorrect price information appearing on [CoinMarketCap]. We are currently investigating and will update this status when we have more information."
According to the website, Bitcoin's market cap appears to be $14.7 quintillion. It also shows Cocos-BCX in first place on the list, despite a low market cap (even under normal circumstances).
"How did it feel to be a trillionaire for a couple hours?" the site, which is owned by crypto exchange Binance, said in a follow-up tweet.
As expected, the bug triggered a wave of social media attention. Some posts on Twitter indicated that TrustWallet, which offers a crypto wallet app, experienced issues in light of the CoinMarketCap bug. Bloomberg reported that Coinbase was affected too.
Some decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols also use CoinMarketCap as a source of price data. DeFi protocol DeFiChain tweeted, "Due to an error with the @CoinMarketCap API, all DeFiChain Vaults have automatically been halted for now, ensuring the safety of your loans." This implies that perhaps loans could have been liquidated based on the incorrect price data.
The bug likely also affected trading bots using the CoinMarketCap API, which would have responsed to the seemingly higher prices.
"Kind of interesting that this rally started exactly at the same time as Coinmarketcap having a pricing bug (roughly 4:25-4:35pm ET). Wonder how many bots are using their API and just started aggro buying on "market movement," tweeted Adam Cochran, partner at Cinneamhain Ventures. "Wow and look at that the first 4 ticks after the bug is fixed are all red and below the trend."
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