Did you have the impression – briefly – of rubbing shoulders with Elon Musk and his cronies yesterday? It’s normal: a bug on CoinMarketCap propelled cryptocurrency prices, and temporarily panicked the cryptosphere.
Crypto prices are going crazy on CoinMarketCap
CoinMarketCap is one of the most widely used data aggregators, and many services use it to display crypto prices. So many users felt like they got an early Christmas present yesterday:
Crazy prices that showed up on the site (Source: CoinMarketCap)
For some time, Bitcoin (BTC) was trading at over $778 billion, Ether (ETH) was worth over $9 billion, and Binance’s BNB was worth $2 billion. The brave Tether (USDT) played its role as a stablecoin well: it was still worth exactly $1.
Many wallets and sites affected by CoinMarketCap bug
Users of TrustWallet, which relies on CoinMarketCap data, have been reporting the bug. Coinbase was also affected: crypto-currencies not tradable on the platform use CoinMarketCap data. On TCN, we also saw these prices explode, and an outsider strangely propelled to the top of the leaderboard:
For its part, CoinMarketCap has chosen the funny way to comment on this bug:
https://twitter.com/CoinMarketCap/status/1470877760260345859
“How did it feel to be a trillionaire for a few hours? “
We don’t know what caused the bug, CoinMarketCap being particularly terse on the subject:
“Due to the irregularities we observed on our platform this afternoon, and despite the fact that the problem has been fixed, we will be restarting our servers. “
Eventually everything is back to normal. Some will regret that their memecoins and shitcoins didn’t actually reach the moon, but it will at least have had the merit of giving a laugh to a crypto-community that’s a bit gloomy at the end of the year…
– khalil (@Zen_Eustass) December 14, 2021
