Cryptocurrencies: they became billionaires for a few hours

They had 1 Bitcoin on their wallet – or about $ 50,000. Suddenly this Bitcoin has acquired a value of $ 852 billion. What if they had 1 Ethereum (about $ 3,800), the latter had a rating of $ 48 billion. Even the young currency Solana was close to $ 2 billion while it usually hovers around $ 150. These numbers did not appear on a platform of secondary reach. They have been posted on CoinMarketCap.com, the reference site for cryptocurrencies since its creation in 2017.

An anomaly lasting a few hours

Several major sites that rely on CoinMarketCap have echoed some of these crazy numbers and among them, Coinbase or Trust Wallet. Relayed (and mocked) on Twitter and elsewhere, theanomaly only lasted a few hours. Coinmarketcap quickly corrected it, responded with a humorous tweet ” How do you feel to be a trillionaire for a few hours », Then announced that it was restarting its servers. How to explain that a site of such a scale could have known such a concern. Internal error or hacking? CoinMarketCap has not communicated on the matter.

Shortly after the correction, the market as a whole experienced an apparently monumental fall (- 99%) which, again, was completely unfounded.

The big question is: were some people able to take advantage of this illusory parenthesis to resell their cryptos at such huge amounts? There was a precedent in May 2021, when the BlockFi platform accidentally credited hundreds of Bitcoin accounts that did not belong to them. BlockFi then demanded that those concerned return these Bitcoins and even brandished legal threats to a user who was reluctant to do so. It is therefore unlikely that anyone could have gotten rich during this short moment of CoinMarketCap failure.