Bitcoin, Cardano, Ether, and Everything Else is Still Down 99% on CoinMarketCap.
On crypto tracking site CoinMarketCap, bitcoin, the world's largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, was down 99 percent.
But don't panic, your bitcoins won't become worthless overnight. The steep price drop was caused by a website issue that occurred in the early hours of Wednesday.
After nearly an hour, the issue that incorrectly displayed bitcoin trading prices was fixed. At press time, pricing data had returned to normal, but data for all-time highs in cryptocurrency remained inaccurate. For example, according to CoinGecko, bitcoin's all-time high is still $8.6 million on CoinMaketCap, which is considerably over its $69,000 top in May 2021.
For retail audiences, sites like CoinMarketCap and CoinGecko are the gatekeepers of the crypto industry. Before publishing prices on their site, they track pricing and trading data on crypto exchanges in real-time, comparing the data to each other for a double-check.
This implies that if bitcoin is shown on CoinMarketCap as trading at $49,000, the amount is derived from actual trading prices on numerous reputable crypto exchanges.
However, like with anything technological, faults do happen. Early Wednesday, a malfunction on CoinMarketCap reported the values of all cryptocurrencies incorrectly, despite the fact that exchange data remained accurate.
As a result, bitcoin's price reached $789 billion, giving it a market capitalization of $14.7 quintillion dollars. Other large-cap cryptocurrencies, like as ether and cardano, experienced similar problems, reaching highs of $757,200 and $256, respectively. At the time of publication, the true prices were $3,867 and $1.25.
As a result of the bug, people like Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov have suggested using decentralised solutions to give pricing data.
In a statement to CoinDesk, he said, "This recent problem is exactly why blockchain apps and smart contracts need to employ decentralised oracle networks like Chainlink." "Relying on a single oracle, or a single source of data, is a formula for disaster, putting user cash at risk undeniably."
As a precaution, some Decentralized Finance (DeFi) initiatives that rely on CoinMarketCap data have paused their offerings. "All DeFiChain Vaults have been automatically paused, for the time being, due to an error with the CoinMarketCap API," DeFiChain, a bitcoin-centric lending business, said.
For decentralised services like lending and borrowing, DeFi protocols rely on smart contracts, which leverage pricing data from third-party services to verify that items given to consumers are in accordance with market rates.
"Following the abnormalities we detected on our platform this afternoon, despite the issue having been repaired, we will be restarting our servers as a final step in accordance with our internal remediation process," CoinMarketCap said in a tweet this morning.
At press time, however, pricing data for all-time high data on CoinMarketCap was still incorrect.
