Last Friday the third of August 2018, Bitcoin appeared to rise around 12% according to CoinMarketCap.com, suggesting to many that a price rise was on the cards for the currency. This was met with optimism, given that over the past few days Bitcoin had otherwise fallen in value, bringing us into August with very little optimism.
Now it transpires that actually. Bitcoin didn’t rise at all and actually, what we saw within the markets entirely on Friday, according to CoinMarketCap.com was actually down to a glitch within their website.
According to Coindesk:
“A CoinMarketCap ‘data issue’ caused significant artificial inflation of several coins listed on the platform on Friday, with some prices inflated by nearly 1000 percent. While bitcoin’s price spiked 12 percent on the crypto data site, other coins saw more drastic increases. The site’s exchange tracker feature was also affected, and falsely indicated that bitcoin was trading above $73,000 on some exchanges.”
Moreover:
“While crypto Twitter speculated about potential price manipulation, bugs and hacking, CoinMarketCap told CoinDesk that the inflation was caused by a data error.
‘There was a price calculation error on tether which caused any listing with a tether market to become artificially inflated,’ marketing vice president Carylyne Chan said in an email.”
See more for yourself, here.
Everything is now back to normal and we can confirm that the statistics currently live on CoinMarketCap.com are correct.
What is the real issue here?
We have to look at how this could have impacted buying decisions and could have influenced trader behaviour. The risk here is that, if prices seem to shoot up falsely, they could in turn encourage people to buy and or sell, when they do this, they may see inconsistencies with the rates shown on the statistics website compared to that of the exchanges which in turn, will cause utter chaos.
The only way to avoid this sort of issue, is simply to ensure that as a trader, you are using multiple sources to get live statistics and currency data. By cross checking, you can be sure you aren’t going to be subject to any of the issues caused by falsely presented price data.
