Late Tuesday afternoon, cryptocurrency pricing aggregation site – CoinMarketCap.com – experienced a major cyber attack or programming failure that artificially sent some prices skyrocketing to valuations in the tens of billions of dollars range for single tokens. Below is a screen shot taken at 04:34 ET. This shows the incorrect listing of over $75 billion for each coin. while being pumped at more than $36 million each unit.

In an attempt to stop hyperinflated trades, both centralized and decentralized Exchanges (DEXs), they removed the pricing feed from trading platforms. Most exchanges have trading “circuit-breakers” that suspend trading on crypto assets that spike out of range on preset algorithms to control such fraudulent behaviors.

At 5:00pm ET, the official CoinMarketCap Twitter (NYSE:) account posted this tweet to its 4 million followers confirming the pricing irregularities and it reads: “Our website is currently undergoing Price Issues – The Engineering team is aware of incorrect price information appearing on CoinMarketCap.com. We are currently investigating and will update this status when we have more information.”

Competing crypto market capitalization aggregation website, CoinGecko.com, seemed to be unaffected and had typical pricing information throughout the duration of CoinMarketCap’s vexing valuations. At the time of writing, CoinMarketCap’s pricing levels had returned to normal. At 7:54 PM ET, the CoinMarketCap Team posted the following tweet.

To The Flipside

• It is crucial that all crypto-space systems have redundant data feeds. CoinMarketCap was the only source of pricing data for DEXs, centralized exchanges, and other systems. This could have led to tens million in losses from exploitive transactions.
• It is unfortunate that this timing was chosen, since the Senate Banking Committee hearing held earlier today was quite negative towards stablecoins as well as crypto.

What are the reasons to care?

It’s unlikely that retail investors would be hurt by such inflated prices on trading exchanges, because if they tried to buy an Ethereum coin for $76 billion the transaction would be declined due to insufficient funds. It will be interesting to check the blockchain, when this is over, to see if anyone successfully sold their tokens at the sky high – yet highly fake – valuations.

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