Slashdot Mirror
A Crypto Website Changes Its Data, and $100 Billion in Market Value Vanishes (wsj.com)
Paul Vigna, writing for WSJ: Prices for some of the most popular cryptocurrencies dropped sharply Monday. One apparent reason: an adjustment from a popular website on its digital-currency price quotes (Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source). A website called coinmarketcap.com on Monday removed data from some South Korean exchanges from its price quotes for a range of virtual currencies including bitcoin, Ethereum and Ripple's XRP. The move followed a South Korean government crackdown on cryptocurrencies. The move by coinmarketcap caused some amount of chaos when prices across the board suddenly plunged. In mid-Monday trading, XRP had fallen 26% over the past 24 hours, Bitcoin Cash was down 18%, and litecoin was down 12%. Of the top 40 cryptocurrencies, 31 were down, including bitcoin and Ethereum. [...]
Coinmarketcap has become one of the most popular destinations for price quotes as the sector surged last year. According to Amazon's web-ranking service, coinmarketcap is currently the 154th most popular website in the world, in the same ballpark as Chinese retail giant Alibaba.com. The website's rejiggered prices led to a flip in market-value rankings on the site. Ethereum, with a $109 billion total market valuation, moved into second place, the spot previously occupied by XRP, which fell to third place with a $97 billion market value. Bitcoin remained number one, with a $255 billion market value.
Coinmarketcap has become one of the most popular destinations for price quotes as the sector surged last year. According to Amazon's web-ranking service, coinmarketcap is currently the 154th most popular website in the world, in the same ballpark as Chinese retail giant Alibaba.com. The website's rejiggered prices led to a flip in market-value rankings on the site. Ethereum, with a $109 billion total market valuation, moved into second place, the spot previously occupied by XRP, which fell to third place with a $97 billion market value. Bitcoin remained number one, with a $255 billion market value.
All I know is that you can trust Dogecoin to hold its value of 1 Doge = 1 Doge.
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It has nothing to do with the nth crackdown. Prices have been significantly higher in South Korea compared to the rest of the world for many coins, if you take the South Korean Won (KRW) trading pair and then convert that price to its US Dollar (or Euro, or whatever) equivalent. However you should see the crypto/KRW exchange rates as a closed system, as it is not an easily traded coin internationally, which make arbitrage (almost) impossible.
It is correct for CoinMarketCap to filter out the crypto/KRW pairs to arrive at an average price, as you were never actually able to trade your coins for the KRW listed (unless you're Korean, of course), and they had a very significant effect on the price if many coins.
Of course, real traders care only about the specific prices of the exchanges they can actually exchange at.