Bitcoin has minted more than a few millionaires in recent years as its value has surged since its inception more than a decade ago, but an apparent display issue made investors substantially wealthier — at least on paper — for a time Tuesday.
Crypto sites, including digital-asset exchange Coinbase Global
COIN,
+1.79%
and CoinMarketCap.com, were acknowledging issues with displayed quotes of some of the most popular cryptocurrencies, including bitcoin
BTCUSD,
-0.43%
and Ether
ETHUSD,
-0.51%
on the Ethereum blockchain.
Context: Coinbase and CoinMarketCap briefly display erratic cryptocurrency price action
Also read: The crypto market is uneasy about the Fed meeting and high inflation. Here’s why.
Popular data site CoinMarketCap.com was showing a single bitcoin briefly trading at roughly $778,000,000,000, as compared with its actual price in the ballpark of $48,000.
One of the founders of dogecoin
DOGEUSD,
-2.29%,
Billy Markus, quipped on Twitter that the snafu had made him an “unrealized quadrillionaire,” with doge’s value also catapulting to a price of $194,509 from the roughly 19 cents displayed on sites including CoinDesk.
Coinbase had been displaying an error message on its site for at least some users.
via Coinbase’s U.S. platform
Even stablecoins, which are intended to be pegged to a fiat currency such as the euro
EURUSD,
+0.08%
or a U.S. dollar
DXY,
-0.09%,
where showing unusual price quotes.
A single unit of the well-known stablecoin Tether was displaying a price of around $14 million, when, in reality, it is meant to hold at $1. Another stablecoin, USD Coin, was being displayed at around $12 million, CoinMarketCap and other sites were showing.
A call to Coinbase representatives wasn’t immediately returned, but the platform indicated via Twitter that it had resolved the issue.
A call to CoinMarketCap also was not returned, but the glitch had been fixed on its site at the time of publication.
Some crypto buyers quipped about how they had reacted when they tried to withdraw the inflated funds. And others joked about the difference between quotes on CoinMarketCap and their actual net worths.
The display issue comes about a week after crypto faced a flash crash over the weekend that brought the value of a range of digital assets down substantially.
This time the issue appears to be almost entirely related to erroneous quotations rather than any genuine price shifts in the crypto markets.