Is this what hyperinflation feels like?
For a brief moment this afternoon, the world was full of trillionaires as one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency price providers appeared to have been hacked, showing massively inaccurate prices across all tokens.
CoinMarketCap began showing the massive numbers for assets like Bitcoin, which was priced at $789,432,690,634.70, while Ethereum showed up as being worth over $523 billion each.
The website quickly issued a statement to explain it was “undergoing price issues”:
Our website is currently undergoing Price Issues
The Engineering team is aware of incorrect price information appearing on https://t.co/3AD93ocjMp.
We are currently investigating and will update this status when we have more information. 👍 🙏
— CoinMarketCap (@CoinMarketCap) December 14, 2021
The “issues” sent cryptocurrency holders’ portfolios soaring explosively higher – with many becoming instant trillionaires…
Or just $400 billionaires…
Many exchanges were affected including Coinbase:
We’re aware some customers are seeing inflated values for non-tradable crypto assets on https://t.co/ohqDivCZYw and Coinbase Wallet. This is a display issue only and does not impact trading.
— Coinbase Support (@CoinbaseSupport) December 14, 2021
Apologies for any confusion – we’re still investigating asset price and trade difficulties on @CoinbaseWallet. Our teams are digging in to investigate and fix.
— Coinbase Support (@CoinbaseSupport) December 14, 2021
CoinMarketCap appeared to find some humor in it – once their systems were back online:
How did it feel to be a trillionaire for a couple hours?😂
— CoinMarketCap (@CoinMarketCap) December 14, 2021
But we suspect more than a few traders are very upset at what just happened.
How many crypto shorts covered when they saw they are down a few trillion dollars.
— zerohedge (@zerohedge) December 14, 2021
When the boomers see the @CoinMarketCap glitch and panic sell #CoinMarketCap pic.twitter.com/4i65xcgTUl
— Brandon (@RevivalBran) December 14, 2021
One thing to consider for some is how this ‘hack’ could be a perfect dry-run example of what central bank digital currencies could do one day: people wake up and their CBDC wallets are up by 1,000,000,000%… but they have to spend the money in the next 30 days… and bread costs $1,000,000 per loaf.
