PRiVCY coin shoots up 36,000,000% in a day to become the fourth largest crypto – but did it really?

• PRiVCY coin shot up by over 36,000,000 percent overnight to set a new record for daily gains and become worth over $57 billion according to CoinMarketCap.
• At that market cap, PRiVCY was larger than Binance Coin, Cardano and Dogecoin – but did it really surge, or was it a glitch?

The cryptocurrency market is no stranger to sudden unexplained price bursts, especially by small-cap cryptos. However, one crypto seems to have set a new record, one that’s beyond imagination, surging by over 36,000,000 percent overnight. Known as PRiVCY coin (PRIV), it shot up from less than one cent to over $,3,500, becoming the fourth-largest cryptocurrency in the market. But did it really?

PRiVCY coin is a little-known project that focuses on privacy and anonymity. It claims to be natively integrated with TOR to enhance anonymity, complete with stealth addresses and instant transactions. It claims on its website to combine proof-of-stake with proof-of-work, making it more efficient and cost-effective.

On June 14, PRiVCY coin was just another of the many small cryptocurrency projects promising to be the “better Bitcoin.” However, almost out of nowhere, the crypto shot up from $0.009 to over $3,500 on CoinMarketCap. With a circulating supply of 16.5 million, the project became instantly worth $57 billion. This was bigger than Binance Coin, Cardano, Dogecoin and XRP, some of the market’s biggest heavyweights.

A $57 billion glitch?

Market experts immediately got to work to look into the project and why it would have shot up astronomically. Many immediately disputed the data and blamed a glitch on CoinMarketCap’s website.

Ajeet Khurana, the founder of Genezis Network, an early stage crypto investment firm, commented:

The error I think came from using the unit price of one and the number of units of another asset and multiplying it to get the market cap. The two assets have got merged, and I am sure, CoinMarketCap will rectify it soon.

PRiVCY coin was listed on just two exchanges – StakeCube and Crex24. It has since been delisted from Crex24 as per its Twitter page. However, there also seemed to exist perpetual futures of an index known as PRIV-PERP which supposedly tracks the price of a basket of privacy coins. This index traded on the FTX exchange and seemed to be the genesis of the CoinMarketCap jumble-up.

Naimish Sanghvi, the CEO of Coin Crunch, a crypto news and data outlet explained the mix-up:

If you look at the spot market on CoinMarketCap.com, the price of PRIV token is quite less, but the price of the index (PRIV-PERP) is quite high in terms of perpetual futures. PRIV is a coin, which is trading on two exchanges, but PRIV is also an index, which is trading on FTX

“There is an error on CoinMarketCap.com, under which, both the tickers have combined, because of which one can see the higher price,” Sanghvi added. “In reality, the price of PRIV token is not high, both are different things and because of the error, it is reporting the meteoric rise incorrectly for PRIV token.”

CoinMarketCap would later amend the glitch and showed that the crypto had tumbled by 100 percent, indicating total collapse. Today, just before press time, CoinMarketCap took down the entire page showing PRIV’s data. “This project is featured as an ‘Untracked Listing’,” the platform stated on PRiVCY’s page.

CoinGecko, the second-most visited crypto market data tracker, was unaffected. It lists PRiVCY’s price as $0.00781966 for a market cap of $245,745. The token ranks in position 2,257 according to the platform