Due to a technical glitch, data provider CoinMarketCap and crypto trading site Coinbase wildly overinflated cryptocurrency values, listing Bitcoin as high as $789B. Both companies said trading was not impacted, resolving price discrepancies within two hours.

Why should we care?
Despite its decentralizing ethos, the crypto space depends on just a handful of data aggregators to maintain accurate trading prices. "Relying on a single oracle, or a single source of data, is a recipe for disaster that undeniably puts user funds at risk," said Sergey Nazarov, co-founder of Chainlink. Bitcoin has faced two other pricing bugs this year. Its value tumbled by 90% on Pyth in September and fell for similar reasons on Binance’s servers in October. False prices listed across multiple platforms can cause mass buy-offs, exacerbating cryptocurrencies’ price volatility and cheating sellers of their imagined gains. The blockchain’s inherent anonymity also makes it hard to diagnose the cause of these glitches: a software problem, malicious external actors, or something else. It’s unclear how crypto platforms will prevent similar episodes moving forward. Despite reports of user panic, CoinMarketCap, owned by Binance, shrugged off the SNAFU, joking that it had created two-hour trillionaires through its pricing error.