Bitcoin Price Briefly Touches $1 Billion as CoinMarketCap Suffers Glitch

For a brief moment, crypto holders around the world were multi-millionaires and billionaires as data from leading crypto price aggregator CoinMarketCap showed some eye-popping figures for prices of crypto assets alongside their market cap and other data.

CoinMarketCap Suffers Technical Glitch

CoinMarketCap confirmed this, writing that its “Engineering team is aware of incorrect price information appearing on (the site)” and that they were “currently investigating and will update this status when we have more information.”

While the glitch has since been fixed, the prices of some assets like Bitcoin were as high as $1.5 quadrillion. Other digital assets like Solana had a value of $338 million, Cardano $2 million, Wrapped Bitcoin had a price of $250 billion while stablecoins like Binance USD, USD Coin, DAI, saw their value surge to over $10 million per coin.

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The bug also led to Shiba Inu briefly ranking as the largest crypto asset by market cap, though its value was much lower at $5,536.

Also, the market cap of the crypto industry generally rose to $20 quintillion.

While the bug appears to have been fixed, the aggregator saw the fun side to it asking its followers on Twitter how they felt to be a trillionaire for a couple of hours.

What the Community is Saying

Crypto community members have been reacting to news of the glitch with some taking the situation as a joke while others thought the value of the coin they had in their wallet was really theirs.

The global head of products at Safemoon tied the astronomical rise of the value of the coin to “CoinMarketCap APIs returning incorrectly placed decimals within our app.” 

UPDATE: We are unable to confirm if this is a hack or a glitch in CoinMarketCap’s system.

We will update you when we know more more about this situation.

— Watcher.Guru (@WatcherGuru) December 14, 2021

WatcherGuru initially stated that the anomaly was as a result of a hack before retracing its statement that it couldn’t confirm if it was a hack or a glitch.

Umm @TrustWallet either there is a bug, or I'm rich.

Please advise which before I hand my notice in. Ta. pic.twitter.com/D0bt9nioFy

— Bez™ 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 (@Cardiff_Bez) December 14, 2021

Other reactions from crypto hodlers show that crypto applications depending on the site like TrustWallet were also affected by the wrong pricing.