Wednesday, December 15, 2021
Billion percent price increase
Crypto platforms briefly turn users into billiardaires
When users of the Coinbase crypto exchange looked into their account last night, they saw some credits that were greater than the assets of Elon Musk. A technical error briefly shows gigantic price increases for many crypto currencies. However, the short-term billionaires cannot realize their profits.
According to data from the Coinbase crypto exchange and the Coinmarketcap.com platform, an ether was allegedly worth more than 13 trillion US dollars for a short time – or, as one user noted in a screenshot, exactly 13,181,942,005,393.83 US dollars. That would have represented a price increase of the digital currency by hundreds of billion percent and a market capitalization of several hundred trillion dollars. Absurd price explosions were also displayed for other cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin, which catapulted the market value into the trillion range and made users seemingly billiardaires.
Numerous Coinbase users shared the status of their Coinbase accounts on social networks, the balance of which was many times that of Elon Musk, the richest person in the world. According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Musk currently has a good $ 250 billion. According to Coinbase, the price swings were only a “display problem”. Users could therefore not trade at the astronomical prices.
Coinmarketcap is a platform that determines prices based on the leading crypto exchanges. It is often used by investors as a guide. Coinbase is one of the most popular trading platforms for crypto currencies, especially in the USA, with more than 50 million users. While many users suspected a hacker attack on the platforms that are important for the crypto scene as the cause, Coinbase announced that there was no evidence that the “technical breakdown” was caused by external parties. However, neither platform provided any information on the actual cause.
Coinbase and Coinmarketcap had fixed the problems by morning and are again showing “correct” rates according to their own information. A Bitcoin currently costs a good 48,000 dollars, Ethereum is quoted at just under 3900 dollars.
Technical problems, hacks or human errors that lead to short-term extreme price fluctuations in cryptocurrencies occur again and again. For example, in September, the Pyth platform used by professional trading services briefly indicated a Bitcoin crash of 90 percent. The reason was obviously that a data provider had made a mistake with the decimal places.