Crypto asset trading podium, Coinbase, experienced a glitch earlier in the week, showing vastly elevated cryptocurrency prices, which led the investors to believe that they were ‘zillionaires’.
Crypto data provider, CoinMarketCap, on the same day, had also displayed inflated prices of the assets due to a similar glitch. Tweets showed Bitcoin’s price at $799 billion on CoinMarketCap and $887 billion on Coinbase. this led users to believe that they had gained enormous amounts of holdings.
Several users took to Twitter to express their short-lived excitement. However, both the platforms had said that they had deployed teams to fix the glitch. CoinMarketCap had even assured its users that the problem was not due to an external source.
Coinbase president Emilie Choi points out that they are still building the infrastructure of this emerging industry
Emilie Choi, the president and COO of Coinbase, explains in an interview with Bloomberg that these glitches are bound to happen as they are still building the infrastructure of an emerging industry. She said that Coinbase is dependent on another provider, like CoinMarketCap, and when they have such glitches, Coinbase will be affected by that. She even acknowledges that there was a glitch, to which she adds that it was only a ‘superficial’ one and that it did not affect the trading. She further adds,
“Remember crypto is 24/7. It’s always on. We have literally never seen the type of technology scaling that we would need to do for this given the number of users and requests per second that we get. And so it’s an exciting thing for us because we have these new milestones almost every week”
Choi takes on an optimistic approach to the issue and states that such incidents are indicative of an emerging industry and that they are still building the infrastructure of this young industry to make sure that everything scales in the right way.
At the time of writing, Bitcoin was priced at $47,695.03 and experienced a daily drop of 1.89%.