The prices of cryptocurrencies traded on Coinbase Global Inc. and popular data provider CoinMarketCap.com briefly altered this Tuesday, December 14, with many tokens showing astronomical increases, leading some users to believe that they had fallen. turned into billionaires, while others wondered what had happened.
Coinbase, the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the US, later reported that the ruling was resolved and trading was not affected, without giving any explanation of what had happened.
“We’ve resolved the display issue and assets no longer appear inflated on @CoinbaseWallet. Trades are processing normally, and we thank you for your patience.“, he tweeted.
“We have not yet found any evidence to suggest that today’s failure was caused by an outside party” CoinMarketCap.com, owned by Binance, the world’s largest digital currency exchange, said in a statement, as multiple netizens speculated that the site had been hacked, Bloomberg reports.
“How did it feel to be a billionaire for a couple of hours?” The data provider joked on his Twitter account.
For their part, some users of the platforms shared screenshots on social media showing the huge profits and their suddenly rising balances online, joking that they almost had a “heart attack” when they saw the abnormal prices.
Meanwhile, others flooded social media with memes, poking fun at operators desperately trying to cash in on their illusory profits. However, not everyone thought the bug was funny. “If it keeps happening, people will go elsewhere to get data“, said Aaron Brown, a crypto investor who writes for Bloomberg Opinion.
“Everybody picks up on those outages, so to the extent that they’re all using the same data source, and so when there’s a problem and the prices are really skewed, that can create herd behavior to drive decisions. investment“, said Rosario Ingargiola, founder of Bosonic, a crypto clearing and settlement platform.