No, you’re not a trillionaire. But you’d be forgiven for soiling your trousers when you took a peek at the price of your favourite cryptocurrency investments on CoinMarketCap on Tuesday afternoon.
CoinMarketCap squashed the dreams of crypto investors around 5pm ET on Tuesday when it explained in a tweet that the shocking jump in price of a variety of cryptocurrencies was due to “price issues” and wasn’t real.
“Our website is currently undergoing Price Issues,” the company tweeted early Tuesday evening. “We are currently investigating and will update this status when we have more information.” As such, it’s currently unclear whether this was a security incident or simply a glitch. We’ve reached out to CoinMarketCap for an explanation.
https://twitter.com/a/status/1470876283924094983
It appears as though the price of every coin jumped by several orders of magnitude, with the price of a single Ethereum coin, for example, rising to more than $US500 (A$697) billion (Real price: Around $US3,800 (A$5,301).) Bitcoin, meanwhile, jumped to around $US789 (A$1,100) billion. That put Bitcoin’s market cap at somewhere between a quadrillion dollars and the Moon.
Between the time the issue first appeared and it apparently being fixed — apparently, a couple of hours, according to CoinMarketCap and social media activity — countless crypto bros saw their net worth skyrocket into Elon Musk territory.
My Coinbase account is up almost $59 Billion in less than 5 minutes. I quit my job and i’m free for the next hour. AMA#Coinbase $bsv #Crypto pic.twitter.com/InOkwHOTdH
— Fren 👽🛸 (@lfgsavages) December 14, 2021
Sadly, false dreams of trashing the boss’s office and buying a libertarian island paradise off the coast of New Zealand were quickly dashed. And CoinMarketCap was so kind as to mock the hopeful with fun, cool tweets.
How did it feel to be a trillionaire for a couple hours?😂
— CoinMarketCap (@CoinMarketCap) December 14, 2021
While CoinMarketCap is having a grand ol’ time, it’s obviously not clear how many people cashed out somehow thinking the price of the Shiba Inu crypto had really jumped to over $US22,000 (A$30,691) when, in reality, its price is currently $US0.00003365 per coin. Hopefully, most investors checked the real exchange rate before blowing all their, uh, hard work (?) because of a screwy website.