And the Glitch Goes On: A Retrospective of Crypto Confusion

Crypto confusion. Bitcoin bugs. Ethereum errors.

Digital currencies have experienced a number of growing pains as people have taken more interest over the years. Each coin and coin exchange has had its fair share of issues in one way or another. These problems have ranged from the harmless to the comically ridiculous. The most recent snafu had people believing that they had become trillionaires overnight. Surprisingly, or maybe not as it’s still a nascent industry there are plenty of other price rollercoaster examples.

CoinMarketCap.com experienced a glitch that inflated the price of bitcoin by thousands of ‘dollars’, smacking billions onto BTC’s market cap. While the actual price of bitcoin didn’t change at all, the show price (what people saw on the listing) was what threw people off. Not to be left out of the party, Ether and Cardano, increased their market caps several hundred times over.

Earlier in the year, coin exchange Pyth Network experienced a similar, albeit opposite, happening with their platform. A glitch within the Pyth Network platform made the price of bitcoin plummet by thousands. This problem was caused by two different price publishers for Pyth marking the price of bitcoin near to zero with some mathematical issues with valuation.

Back in May of this year, Wax tokens on the MoonPay platform were frozen for several days. For many people, purchasing Wax resulted in massive delays. During the time where the currency was frozen fell from $0.18 to $0.11 before increasing to $0.15. According to MoonPay, the delays were caused by a liquidity partner suspending all withdrawals of Wax.

Last year, in December, Filecoin had its own glitch experience which forced the platform to halt transactions. Instead of having one or a few forms of crypto become compromised, the whole platform experienced a network outage. It took a few days to get the platform back up and running after the problem was identified. To solve the issue, the entire network needed to be updated with a system upgrade.

As far back as February 2018, a Japanese coin exchange known as Zaif devalued cryptocurrency prices all the way to zero, which allowed people the opportunity to briefly purchase currency for free. However, nobody made off with any ill-gotten funds.

Each of these situations was spurred by…..well, no one knows.? Was it a computer burp, an algorithm quirk, some “Whale” dumping shares, or even a nefarious attempt by a country such as China or “the rocket man’s” North Korea trying to shake everyone’s confidence? Who knows,? and as long as the issues are fixed promptly, who cares.

For you see, cryptocurrency isn’t going anywhere and, while it might not be perfect, it will go through some growing pains . Glitches happen. When it comes to money, it can be disconcerting to think that something could happen to your hard-earned funds. While digital currency is still growing, financial glitches are nothing new. The most important thing is that no consumer lost true value on their investment that wasn’t naturally slated to happen in the first place. You might have 99 BTC problems, but you can rest assured that a glitch ain’t one.