- CoinMarketCap and Coinbase temporarily displayed sky-high crypto prices on Tuesday, making some users believe they scored oversized gains.
- Both platforms said the issue had been resolved, but didn't explain what caused the incident.
- Tweets showed bitcoin's price at $799 billion on CoinMarketCap, and at $887 billion on Coinbase.
Popular data provider CoinMarketCap and crypto exchange Coinbase briefly showed vastly inflated cryptocurrency prices on Tuesday following apparent glitches on their respective platforms, leading some users to believe they made enormous gains off customer holdings.
Tweets from unverified accounts showed bitcoin's value on CoinMarketCap at $799 billion per coin, giving it a market value of $14.7 quintillion. Another tweet showed it trading even higher at $887 billion per coin on Coinbase.
CoinMarketCap said Tuesday its engineering team was aware of incorrect price information on its site, which seems to have lasted for about an hour. Soon after, it said the team "has deployed a fix, all prices should be accurate." The data aggregator, which is owned by Binance, said there is no evidence suggesting its glitch was caused by an external party, Bloomberg reported.
It also joked about the incident on Twitter, saying "how did it feel to be a trillionaire for a couple hours?"
Coinbase too acknowledged the issue in a tweet, saying it was aware some users were seeing inflated values for non-tradable crypto assets. "This is a display issue only and does not impact trading," the company said.
Later Tuesday, Coinbase confirmed the issue had been resolved and prices should again reflect the correct market value. A Coinbase representative declined to comment further on the incident.
It isn't clear for how long crypto prices reflected incorrectly on Coinbase. But the outage took the team about two hours to fix, according to the time gap between tweets on its support page.
Kris Marszalek, CEO of crypto exchange Crypto.com, said the company is already working on removing CoinMarketCap's "unreliable price feed" from its product.
The bug set off a stream of users tweeting about oversized gains.
As one of the most widely used websites for crypto data, CoinMarketCap's error actually has major implications for the blockchain apps that rely on it as their sole source of financial data, according to Sergey Nazarov, co-founder of oracle network Chainlink.
This is because there could have been heavy user losses and false liquidations if a blockchain lending app had been using a single source to gauge the price of an asset.
"Relying on a single oracle, or a single source of data, is a recipe for disaster that undeniably puts user funds at risk," Nazarov said.
Trading glitches aren't new to the crypto world. A bug caused bitcoin to plunge 90% to around $5,400 on solana-based network Pyth in September. Separately, bitcoin briefly tumbled to about $8,000 on Binance's US trading platform in October.
"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," CoinMarketCap said on Wednesday. "Apologies for the inconvenience."
Crypto prices looked like they were back to normal on both platforms Wednesday, showing bitcoin trading around $48,200.