On Friday (3 August 2018), around 15:15 (UTC), CoinMarketCap started showing wildly inflated prices on its site (e.g. over $73,000 for Bitcoin on some exchanges). And this situation persisted for around 30 minutes, until the staff managed to fix the problem that was causing these incorrect prices to be shown. Roughly another two and a half hours later, the company had an explanation: it wasn’t hacked; it was just “a glitch”.
Crypto traders/investors all over the world were very confused when they first saw some of the prices being displayed by CoinMarketCap. Here are a few reactions from users on Twitter, stating with CNBC's “Crypto Trader”, Ran NeuNer:
What just happened? CMC hacked?? pic.twitter.com/RxYAfVLyK7
— Ran NeuNer (@cryptomanran) August 3, 2018
In his next tweet, he called what he was seeing “the worst thing anyone has ever done to us!”
Twitter user “Laurinna90” was seeing even more crazy price increases, as can be seen in the following two tweets:
Wtf is happening to coinmarketcap pic.twitter.com/mhmQBG7PJi
— Laurianna (@Laurianna90) August 3, 2018
#Coinmarketcap #rekt 🤪🤓😎real time pic.twitter.com/z8WG5Rvc60
— Laurianna (@Laurianna90) August 3, 2018
Meanwhile, another Twitter user “DesiCryptoHodlr” was seeing CoinMarketCap’s site display BTC prices of over $73,000 on BitForex, CoinBene, CoinEx, BigONE, and FCoin:
$BTC reached $73,000 on multiple exchanges according to CoinMarketCap 😂 pic.twitter.com/wxCrXiVu0O
— Indian CryptoGirl (@DesiCryptoHodlr) August 3, 2018
Then, around 16:30 (UTC), or about one hour after CoinMarketCap started showing wrong prices for many cryptocurrencies, people started noticing that Tether (USDT) had disappeared from the list of cryptocurrencies shown by CoinMarketCap:
Tether $usdt dropped from Coinmarketcap. Care to comment? @CoinMarketCap pic.twitter.com/q8FQBOrCN8
— CryptoJ0ules (@CryptoJ0ules) August 3, 2018
Fortunately, the CoinMarketCap team was able to fix this problem within roughly 30 minutes (like the earlier pricing issue).
At 17:01 (UTC), CoinMarketCap replied to one Twitter user that had accused them of market manipulation:
Hello, this was not manipulation. There was an issue with the data we were pulling in. Our team is actively investigating the matter and will have it resolved soon. We will be releasing a statement soon. Thank you for your understanding.
— CoinMarketCap (@CoinMarketCap) August 3, 2018
Finally, at 18:25 (UTC), CoinMarketCap users on Twitter got the apology (if not quite the full explanation) that they had been impatiently waiting for:
We apologize for the glitch earlier. There was a price calculation error on Tether which caused any listing with a Tether market to become artificially inflated. We will release a post mortem in the near future giving more details and our plans for preventing this in the future.
— CoinMarketCap (@CoinMarketCap) August 3, 2018
However, not everyone seemed impressed with this apology. For example, here is what one Twitter user had to say in reply to the above tweet:
Will you contact the bosses for all the people who checked cmc in their lunch and saw they were rich and told their boss to fu^* off and left their job😅
— Al3ks@nd3r L13n (@thealeksandret) August 3, 2018
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