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,
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,
Coinbase had been displaying an error message on its site for at least some users.
Even stablecoins, which are intended to be pegged to a fiat currency such as the euro EURUSD,
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.