Only a paper moon: Bitcoin price briefly shows $870B on CoinMarketCap

Crypto traders experienced a moment of gush, followed by confusion, when a glitch caused several data aggregators to briefly display enormous gains for Bitcoin (BTC), Ether (ETH) and other cryptocurrencies.

CoinMarketCap and several other price indexes showed the Bitcoin price closing to $900 billion as ETH has shown over $81 billion. The momentary glitch also impacted Cointelegraph’s price indexes.

Hey @CoinMarketCap, you doing ok there buddy? pic.twitter.com/WfXwpSmURU

— Cointelegraph (@Cointelegraph) December 14, 2021

Displayed numbers didn’t affect the trading prices on exchanges, and the platforms quickly solved the issue. CoinMarketCap explained on Twitter that the data provider is rebooting its servers as part of the remediation plan.

“CoinMarketCap is now back to normal after an issue that affected our price rankings,” a spokesperson told Cointelegraph, adding that the investigation on the root cause of the glitch is still ongoing:

“And no, we didn’t show you prices from 2026. We'd hold on that Lambo downpayment.”

Crypto Twitter was quick to react to the unrealistic price movement with hilarious posts:

pic.twitter.com/xircZlbHNh

— khalil (@Zen_Eustass) December 14, 2021

Initial speculation was that hackers caused the displayed prices:

ME after checking that #CoinMarketCap was hacked and the prices were all fake. pic.twitter.com/5cyS5iw4Y5

— Muttley Investor (@MuttleyInvesti1) December 14, 2021

“Everyone tunes into those disruptions, so to the extent they all use the same data source,” Bosonic founder Rosario Ingargiola explained, “So when there’s a problem and prices are really off, that can create herd behavior to drive investment decisions.”