(Bloomberg) — The finger-pointing has already started after data glitches resulted in the brief display of astronomical gains for many cryptocurrencies at CoinMarketCap.com and Coinbase Global Inc. late Tuesday.
Crypto.com Chief Executive Officer Kris Marszalek blamed data provider CoinMarketCap.com’s price feed for the inflated prices displayed within the crypto exchange’s app. Trading activity wasn’t affected, he said in a tweet, but the company is “working on removing @CoinMarketCap’s unreliable price feed” from its product.
Coinbase, the largest U.S. crypto exchange, uses its application programming interface, or API, CoinMarketCap.com said in a statement. Web sites use APIs to talk to each other. A website can make its APIs available so other websites can embed their data, for example.
By Tuesday evening, the issues of pricing display were resolved at CoinMarketCap.com and Coinbase, although some Coinbase customers later had problems accessing the platform temporarily. When asked about how Coinbase sources its data on coin prices, the company didn’t provide an answer and pointed to tweets by Coinbase Support instead, which didn’t provide an explanation for the glitches.
“The perception here is it happens quite often to the level that people start to get impatient,” said Owen Lau, an analyst at Oppenheimer & Co. “While people are still looking for the root cause, I won’t be surprised to hear that people would blame the client facing app like Coinbase even if the problem comes from the data supplied by the third party.”
Binance, the largest crypto exchange, controls CoinMarketCap.
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