The finger-pointing has already started after data glitches resulted in the brief display of astronomical gains for many cryptocurrencies late Tuesday.
Crypto.com Chief Executive Kris Marszalek blamed popular data provider CoinMarketCap.com and said it was working to remove the “unreliable price feed” from its site. Coinbase Global Inc. President and Chief Operating Officer Emilie Choi also cited bad pricing data from CoinMarketCap.com, which is own by rival exchange Binance.
The incident was “indicative of an emerging industry,” Choi said during an interview Wednesday at the Bloomberg Technology Summit. Coinbase, the largest U.S. crypto exchange, has more than 70 million customers worldwide.
While the exact cause of the glitches is still unclear, some industry members point to the possible role of API, or application programming interface. Websites use APIs to talk to each other, and a website can make its APIs available so other websites can embed their data, for example.
Coinbase didn’t respond to questions on how much its pays for CoinMarketCap’s data feed. Crypto.com declined to comment.
Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee, told Bloomberg in a statement Wednesday that Coinbase “owes its customers a safe crypto exchange platform instead of one riddled with outages, hacks, and bugs.”
