A Glitch On A Cryptocurrency Service Mistakenly Made Everyone Think They Were Trillionaires For About An Hour

To those who reluctant to get into it, cryptocurrency can seem like a wild, reckless, even dangerous endeavor. It makes for jokey currencies, tie-ins with popular TV characters, and, of course, it gets a lot of people scammed. A good example of the dodgier nature of the biz happened Tuesday, when CoinMarketCap, a utility that aggregates crypto market data, suffered a bit of a glitch. How big? Big enough to make its users think they were all suddenly billionaires or trillionaires for about an hour.

Late in the day, those monitoring their crypto accounts on the service saw that their prices, market capitalizations, and more had abruptly skyrocketed. That includes Bitcoin, whose own market cap soared to an explosive $14.7 quintillion.

But it was not to be. Around 5pm EST, CoinMarketCap operators acknowledged that the “Engineering team is aware of incorrect price information appearing on [CoinMarketCap]. We are currently investigating and will update this status when we have more information.”

The glitch was resolved and then the service’s Twitter team rubbed salt on the wound, writing, “How did it feel to be a trillionaire for a couple hours?”

The freak occurrence received extensive social media coverage, with people posting screencaps of their too-big-to-be-real crypto numbers, and joking about all the things they were going to buy with their totally real and now flush alternative currencies.

Anyway, surely nothing to worry about when questionable and under-regulated forms of currency briefly turns numerous people into the richest humans on the planet before reminding them that they again have nothing.

(Via The Block)