Basically, the glitch caused the displayed value of bitcoin to be worth $878 billion, and as a result, many owners were suddenly seeing their accounts rise into the millions, billions, and in some cases, trillions of dollars. It not only affected bitcoin, but it has also affected other cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum and Ripple.
My Coinbase account is up almost $59 Billion in less than 5 minutes. I quit my job and i’m free for the next hour. AMA#Coinbase $bsv #Crypto pic.twitter.com/InOkwHOTdH
— Neo (@NeoWiseFP) December 14, 2021
Unfortunately, this was obviously too good to be true and many had reached out to the platforms to ask them about it. In a tweet by Coinbase, the company said, “We’re aware some customers are seeing inflated values for non-tradable crypto assets on Coinbase.com and Coinbase Wallet. This is a display issue only and does not impact trading.”
CoinMarketCap also said that they are investigating what caused the pricing error and also denied that they might have been hacked. That being said, this seems to have only affected those two platforms and if you’re trading bitcoin on other exchanges, you probably weren’t affected.